“And she has refused to marry him. Why?” asked Eve, very pale.
“Who knows? Mere airs and graces, I dare say. She thinks she has all London at her feet, and that she can pick and choose. How I wish I were on the stage! I can sing pretty well, can’t I, Eve? And I have often been told that I am like Ellen Terry.”
In her angry excitement, Sophy saw a vision of herself as the queen of a theatre, all the town rushing to see her act, as they went to see this Venetian peasant. Surely a young lady with good blood in her veins must be better than a girl bred in a hovel. Sophy did not pause to consider that it was the rough freshness, the primitive vigour of the peasant which constituted Signora Vivanti’s chief claim to notice.
Sophy had exercised no small amount of self-control in restraining her tears during the homeward drive; but once safe in the sanctuary of her bedroom she let loose the flood of her emotions, with its crosscurrents of anger and sorrow, disappointed ambition, and disappointed love. Yes, love. Considering Mr. Sefton, in the first instance, only from the social point of view, with the mercenary feelings engendered by a youth of poverty, she had allowed herself to be beguiled by his attentions, and had entered at the golden gate of that fool’s paradise which first love creates for its victim—a world of fevered dreams, where nothing is but what is not. Walking in the enchanted groves of that paradise, she had seen Wilfred Sefton in the light that never was on land or sea—the light that beautifies all waking dreams—and she had interpreted every speech of his after her own fashion. Words lightly spoken took the deepest meaning—not his meaning, but hers. She told herself again and again that, if he had not actually asked her to be his wife, he had spoken words which a man only speaks to the woman whose life is to be interwoven with his own.
Eve came to her sister’s door and insisted upon being admitted.
“Oh, what streaming eyes! Sophy, dearest, I am so sorry you have allowed yourself to care for him. I warned you, dear; I warned you.”
“Yes,” retorted Sophy, irritated beyond measure at a form of speech which is always irritating, “but you didn’t warn me of anything like the truth. You didn’t tell me that he was passionately, ridiculously, degradingly in love with that Venetian girl.”
“My dearest, how could I warn you of what I did not know?”
“Don’t dearest me. I am almost out of my mind—indeed, I should not be surprised if I were to have brain fever, or something. When I remember how I have lowered myself—letting him see that I cared for him; for I have no doubt he did see, and that was why he made me his confidante this afternoon, and told me about that creature—a woman with a nameless son. Do you think I can ever get over the degradation of being talked to about such a subject?”
Eve did not answer. She sank down upon the sofa, while her sister stood before the looking-glass, frowning at her tear-stained face as she unbuttoned the bodice of her gown, that gown which she made a point of calling her “frock.”
Her nameless son. Eve remembered the boy in the boat, the Murillo-faced boy, looking up with big wondering eyes as his mother and Vansittart clasped hands. Her nameless son. She remembered that curious speech of Vansittart’s a week ago—“Yes, it was at Venice we met. That is the first half of the riddle.” What was the second half? The parentage of that boy, perhaps. His son—his son—another woman’s and his. And she, his adoring wife, had no son to place in his arms, no child to gratify the wellborn man’s desire to see his race prolonged.
“If I live to be an old woman he may die without an heir,” she thought. “There may be no more Vansittarts of Merewood. Hannah’s husband did not hate her because she was childless—but then he had other wives.”
She pictured her husband loving that alien’s son, making him his heir perhaps by-and-by, desiring to bring him into his home, asking her to receive Hagar’s child, to let him call her mother. She had heard of such things being done.
“No, no, no, not for worlds,” she protested to herself. “I could not do it.”
She got up and walked about the room, while Sophy bathed her eyes, and tried to undo the damages her emotions had inflicted on her delicate prettiness.
“I can’t go to the party looking like this,” exclaimed Sophy, ruefully contemplating her swollen eyelids in the glass.
“We need not go till half-past ten. Eleven o’clock would be early enough. There is time for you to get back your good looks. Benson shall bring you a light little dinner, and then you had better lie down and take a long nap.”
“Do you think I can eat or sleep in my state of mind?” protested Sophy; but a quarter of an hour later, when Benson appeared with an appetizing meal, the victim of misplaced affection found that violent emotions are not incompatible with hunger.
She eat her dinner, cried a little now and then between whiles, and at half-past ten went down to the drawing-room in her most attractive frock, and with her light fluffy hair piled as high as she could pile it, and sparkling with those dainty paste stars which Eve had sported at the memorable hunt ball.
“Sophy,” cried Vansittart, “I vow you look almost as pretty as Eve looked that night in the snow. And what do I see? Surely I know those quivering starlets! You are wearing the family diamonds.”
Sophy rewarded him with a most ungracious scowl, and moved to the other side of the room. Vansittart was looking at an evening paper, and was
