“Has it never struck you that John may be the cause of it all?”
Sir Oliver jerked himself round in his chair. “John? What do you mean?”
“Why, I wrote to John at the same time that I did to you,” said Lady Blount, “begging him to come down in almost the same words; for you know, dear Walter, I 'm not a clever woman and can't say the same thing in two different ways. She does n't know I did so, for she's so strange and won't talk to any one alone, if she can help it. I thought John and you might succeed in getting something out of her. But John has n't replied at all. I can't understand it.”
“Does n't that bear out what I say?” asked Herold.
“But John—what do you mean?” Sir Oliver repeated.
“Yes, dear, what do you mean? Of course John has behaved in an extraordinary way lately. He has n't been to see us for ever so long. But the dear fellow has explained. He is overwhelmed with work, especially at week-ends. He writes me charming letters, and he corresponds regularly with Stella. I don't see—“.
“Oh, for heaven's sake, Julia, let Walter put in a word!” cried Sir Oliver, rising and throwing his cigarette-end into the bank of flowering-plants that filled the summer fireplace, a domestic outrage that always irritated Lady Blount, and even now caused her to wince and dart an angry glance at the perpetrator. “Go on. Tell us what you mean.”
“Has it never occurred to you that Stella and John may have fallen in love with each other—with the ghastly barrier of the wife between them?”
The two old people looked at him wide-eyed and drooping-mouthed. That Stellamaris, their fragile, impalpable child of mystery, more precious to them than a child of their own bodies, over whom they might have quarrelled—that Stellamaris should be a grown woman, capable of a grown woman's passions, was a proposition bewilderingly preposterous. Sir Oliver found speech first.
“Stella in love with John? It 's absurd; it's ludicrous. Why, bless my soul! you might just as well say she was in love with me! It's nonsense—ridiculous nonsense.”