I had not the courage to be ingenuous. Ah! if I had!
“Nay, you have not offended,” I answered hastily—“I am only worried with some unmanageable thoughts. The law, you know, is full of provoking, exciting, irritating necessities.”
She looked at ne with a kind but searching glance. My soul seemed to shrink from that scrutiny. My eyes sunk beneath her gaze.
“I wish I knew how to console you, Edward: to make you entirely happy. I pray for it, Edward. I thought we were always to be so happy. Did you not promise me that you would always leave your cares at your office—that our cottage should be sacred to love and peace only?”
She put her arms about my neck, and looked into my face with such a sweet, strange, persuasive smile—half mirth, half sadness—that the evil spirit was subdued within me. I clasped her fervently in my embrace, with all my old feelings of confidence and joy renewed. At this moment the servant announced Mr. Edgerton, and with a start—a movement—scarcely as gentle as it should have been, I put the fond and still beloved woman from my embrace!
CHAPTER XXI. — CHANGES OF HOME.
From this time my intercourse with William Edgerton was, on my part, one of the most painful and difficult constraint. I had nothing to reproach him with; no grounds whatever for quarrel; and could not, in his case—regarding the long intimacy which I had maintained with himself and father, and the obligations which were due from me to both—adopt such a manner of reserve and distance as to produce the result of indifference and estrangement which I now anxiously desired. I was still compelled to meet him—meet him, too, with an affectation of good feeling and good humor, which I soon found it, of all things in the world, the most difficult even to pretend. How much would I have given could he only have provoked me to anger on any ground—could he have given me an occasion for difference of any sort or to any degree—anything which could have justified a mutual falling off from the old intimacy! But William Edgerton was meekness and kindness itself. His confidence in me was of the most unobservant, suspicionless character; either that, or I succeeded better than I thought in the effort to maintain the external aspects of old friendship. He saw nothing of change in my deportment. He seemed not to see it, at least; and came as usual, or more frequently than usual, to my house, until, at length, the studio of my wife was quite as much his as hers—nay, more; for, after a brief space, whether it was that Julia saw what troubled me, or felt herself the imprudence of Edgerton's conduct, she almost entirely surrendered it to him. She was not now so often to be seen in it.
This proceeding alarmed me. I dreaded lest my secret should be discovered. I was shocked lest my wife should suppose me jealous. The feeling is one which carries with it a sufficiently severe commentary, in the fact that most men are heartily ashamed to be thought to suffer from it. But, if it vexed me to think that she should know or suspect the truth, how much more was I troubled lest it should be seen or suspected by others! This fear led to new circumspection. I now affected levities of demeanor and remark; studiously absented myself from home of an evening, leaving my wife with Edgerton, or any other friend who happened to be present; and, though I began no practices of profligacy, such as are common to young scapegraces in all times, I yet, to some moderate extent, affected them.