tears in her voice. “She made me go to Paris, and—”
“Yes,” interrupted Lord Carthewe, “and she forbade me her house for a week, and thus virtually sent me over there to pass the time! Oh, my love, my love! Fate has indeed been cruel to us! I curse these chains of honour, I curse the folly that made me forge them for myself, but it is utterly, utterly beyond my power to break them!”
Rhea’s hand fell limply to her side. Her brain was on fire, yet she felt frozen, benumbed, half-paralyzed.
“Utterly out of his power to break his chains,” did he say? Oh, then it lay in her power to keep him true to his spoken word; to “grasp, to hold, to keep him against all heaven and all earth.” The Chinese lantern over her head went out with a splutter. The golden grey of the morning poured in now through the half-turned Venetian shutter. One long, narrow ray slanted to Rhea’s feet and setting her jewelled shoe-buckles glittering, found out an ugly tarnished spot on the silver embroideries of her dress.
Rhea looked down on it curiously. Left there by a man’s tears, was it? And once more there seemed to sound in her ears the passionate, boyish voice saying, “I love her so I must leave her. I will quit at once, and forever take myself out of her life.”
She rose slowly, unsteadily to her feet, feeling less like a living, breathing woman than a walking marble statue.
As she entered the principal drawing-room, Dulcie, with averted face, fluttered across it at the further end and went out by another door.
The rooms showed disordered and desolate now, with their faded flowers and drooping greenery and candles here and there flickering in their sockets as Rhea passed on to the room where she felt sure Lord Carthewe still lingered. Yes, there he was, leaning back on a large settee, in a listless, dreamy attitude, with one hand covering his eyes.
He started to his feet as she entered and began a somewhat disjointed series of apologies.
“It is so late—I fancied you must have retired—I was thinking that, perhaps, after all, you would rather see me in the morning,” he said, then broke off abruptly, for the man was too innately true and honest to be a ready fabricator of glib society lies. Rhea was very white, but her grace of manner had come back to her, together with her sweet, measured-out “society smile.”
“Pray don’t apologise,” she said. “I am glad to be able to save you the trouble of calling tomorrow. I told you, don’t you know, that I would give you your answer tonight.”
Lord Carthewe drew a step nearer. His attitude was not that of a hopeful or expectant lover. His head was bowed; his fingers were clenched into the palms of his hands with the restraint he put upon himself.
“And that answer is—?” he queried nervously.
“I hope you’ll forgive me, I fear it must be a plain, unqualified ‘No,’ ” she answered, her pleasant smile still playing about her lips.
“I have thought the matter well over; I feel sure you will not press me for a reason. I am very grateful for the compliment you have paid me I hope we shall always be friends. Now, if you do not mind, I will say ‘good night,’ or rather, ‘good morning.’ I am very tired—almost tired to death.”
It was after this, within six months of Dulcie’s marriage to Lord Carthewe that the Bishop of St. Cheviot’s passed judgment upon Lady Glencross as a woman of the world, and Lord Chenevix sighed his regrets that a diplomatic career had been denied her.
Drifting
He had drawn up his boat high on the beach, and now lay at the girl’s feet, as she sat, out of reach of the tide, on a big boulder stone. There had fallen a long silence between them—a silence in which, to his fancy, her heart had cried aloud to his, as, in the stillness, the sea-pyot had cried aloud to the sea.
He was the first to break that silence.
“Let us at least be honest with each other,” he said in a constrained, bitter tone. “Let us look the whole miserable facts in the face, and not cheat ourselves into believing that things are better than they are. Supposing that you were to break faith with Euan Mackreth, that would not give me the right to ask you to be my wife, with a millstone of debts—twenty thousand pounds if it’s a penny—hanging about my neck. No. Nor would it help you and your mother out of your financial difficulties. I suppose you two are in pretty nearly as evil a case as I am?”
“In a worse, if anything,” answered the girl under her breath.
“And even supposing—not that such a thing is likely, no, nor even possible that some kind fairy, in the shape of a rich relative, were to come forward and clear off the whole of my liabilities. What then! What am I fit for in life? How should I set about earning my own living? What could I do that would give me the hope of being able, even in twenty years’ time, to ask a girl to be my wife to whom luxury and refinement are the very breath of life. Ma mignonne—ma mignonne, things look very black for us! Turn which way I will, I see no rift in the clouds.”
A fit trysting-place for a pair of lovers, this lonely corner of Glen Orloch Isle! Not a human soul save themselves did this scene of sea and sky and cliff enclose. At their feet lay the blue waters of Loch Rhuy; behind them the gaunt mountains, patched with olive-green and golden-brown mosses, seemed to tower upwards to the heavens themselves. Not a sound broke the evening stillness save the lazy lapping and curling of the summer sea, the whirr of a pyot overhead, or the hoarse croak of a
