Part 45 (1/2)

”And”--half removing the barring fingers--”I am the dearest, sweetest, best Molly to be found anywhere?”

”Oh, darling! don't you know I think so?” says Luttrell, with pa.s.sionate fondness.

”And you will never forgive yourself for making me so unhappy?”

”Never.”

”Very well,”--taking away her hand, with a contented sigh,--”now you may kiss me.”

So their quarrel ends, as all her quarrels do, by every one being in the wrong except herself. It is their first bad quarrel; and although we are told ”the falling out of faithful friends is but the renewal of love,” still, believe me, each angry word creates a gap in the chain of love,--a gap that widens and ever widens more and more, until at length comes the terrible day when the cherished chain falls quite asunder. A second coldness is so much easier than a first!

CHAPTER XVII.

”One silly cross Wrought all my loss.

O frowning fortune!”

--_The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim._

It was an unfortunate thing,--nay, more, it was an unheard-of thing (because for a man to fall in love with his own wife has in it all the elements of absurdity, and makes one lose faith in the wise saws and settled convictions of centuries),--but the fact remained. From the moment Sir Penthony Stafford came face to face with his wife in the corridor at Herst he lost his heart to her.

There only rested one thing more to make the catastrophe complete, and that also came to pa.s.s: Cecil was fully and entirely aware of his sentiments with regard to her.

What woman but knows when a man loves her? What woman but knows (in spite of all the lies she may utter to her own heart) when a man has ceased to love her? In dark moments, in the cruel quiet of midnight, has not the terrible certainty of her loss made her youth grow dead within her?

Cecil's revenge has come, and I hardly think she spares it.

Scrupulously, carefully, she adheres to her _role_ of friend, never for an instant permitting him to break through the cold barricade of mere good-fellows.h.i.+p she has raised between them.

Should he in an imprudent moment seek to undermine this barrier, by a word, a smile, sweet but chilling, she expresses either astonishment or amus.e.m.e.nt at his presumption (the latter being perhaps the more murderous weapon of the two, as ridicule is death to love), and so checks him.

To her Sir Penthony is an acquaintance,--a rather amusing one, but still an acquaintance only,--and so she gives him to understand; while he chafes and curses his luck a good deal at times, and--grows desperately jealous.

The development of this last quality delights Cecil. Her flirtation with Talbot Lowry,--not that it can be called a flirtation, being a very one-sided affair, the affection Talbot entertains for her being the only affection about it,--carefully as he seeks to hide it, irritates Sir Penthony beyond endurance, and, together with her marked coldness and apparent want of desire for his society, renders him thoroughly unhappy.

All this gratifies Cecil, who is much too real a woman not to find pleasure in seeing a man made miserable for love of her.

”I wish you could bring yourself to speak to me now and then without putting that odious 'Sir' before my name,” he says to her one day.

”Anybody would say we were utter strangers.”

”Well, and so we are,” Cecil replies, opening wide her eyes in affected astonishment. ”How can you dispute it? Why, you never even saw me until a few days ago.”

”You are my wife at all events,” says the young man, slightly discomfited.

”Ay, more's the pity,” murmurs her ladys.h.i.+p, with such a sudden, bewitching, aggravating smile as entirely condones the incivility of her speech. Sir Penthony smiles too.

”Cecil--Cis,--a pretty name.--It rhymes with kiss,” he says, rather sentimentally.

”So it does. And Penthony,--what does that rhyme with? Tony--money. Ah!

that was our stumbling block.”