A month thereafter, when they were sitting at breakfast one morning, Marcia exclaimed
'Well--good heavens!' while reading a letter she had just received from Avice, who was living with her husband in a house Pierston had bought for them at Sandbourne.
Jocelyn looked up.
'Why--Avice says she wants to be separated from Henri! Did you ever hear of such a thing! She's coming here about it to-day.'
'Separated? What does the child mean!' Pierston read the letter. 'Ridiculous nonsense!' he continued. 'She doesn't know what she wants. I say she sha'n't be separated! Tell her so, and there's an end of it. Why--how long have they been married? Not twelve months.
What will she say when they have been married twenty years!'
Marcia remained reflecting. 'I think that remorseful feeling she unluckily has at times, of having disobeyed her mother, and caused her death, makes her irritable,' she murmured.
'Poor child!'
Lunch-time had hardly come when Avice arrived, looking very tearful and excited.
Marcia took her into an inner room, had a conversation with her, and they came out together.
'O it's nothing,' said Marcia. 'I tell her she must go back directly she has had some luncheon.'
'Ah, that's all very well!' sobbed Avice. 'B-b-but if you had been m- married so long as I have, y-you wouldn't say go back like that!'
'What is it all about?' inquired Pierston.
'He said that if he were to die I--I--should be looking out for somebody with fair hair and grey eyes, just--just to spite him in his grave, because he's dark, and he's quite sure I don't like dark people! And then he said--But I won't be so treacherous as to tell any more about him! I wish--'
'Avice, your mother did this very thing. And she went back to her husband. Now you are to do the same. Let me see; there is a train--'
'She must have something to eat first. Sit down, dear.'
The question was settled by the arrival of Henri himself at the end of luncheon, with a very anxious and pale face. Pierston went off to a business meeting, and left the young couple to adjust their differences in their own way.
His business was, among kindred undertakings which followed the extinction of the Well-Beloved and other ideals, to advance a scheme for the closing of the old natural fountains in the Street of Wells, because of their possible contamination, and supplying the townlet with water from pipes, a scheme that was carried out at his expense, as is well known. He was also engaged in acquiring some old moss-grown, mullioned Elizabethan cottages, for the purpose of pulling them down because they were damp; which he afterwards did, and built new ones with hollow walls, and full of ventilators.
At present he is sometimes mentioned as 'the late Mr. Pierston' by gourd-like young art-critics and journalists; and his productions are alluded to as those of a man not without genius, whose powers were insufficiently recognized in his lifetime.
----- The End -----
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