Part 21 (1/2)

The awkward thing was telling Jane about it. Jane had been his dead wife's friend before he married her, and she had known her better then than she knew Kitty. Yet he remembered, acutely, how he had gone to her eight years ago, and told her that he was going to marry Amy, and how she had kissed him and said nothing, and how, when he asked her if she had any objection, she had said ”No, none. But isn't it a little sudden?”

He wondered how Jane would look when he told her he was going to marry Kitty. That was bound to strike her as very sudden indeed.

It was wonderful to him that this thing should have happened to him. He was aware that it was a new thing. Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. He had been very young eight years ago, and a gayer, lighter-hearted chivalry had gone to his courts.h.i.+p of poor Amy.

Poor Amy, though he would not own it, had been a rather ineffectual woman, with a prodigious opinion of her small self and a fretting pa.s.sion for dominion. She had had a crowd of friends and relations whom she had allowed to come between them. Poor Amy had never understood him.

There were heights and depths in him to which she had made no appeal.

But Kitty--she had brought something out of him that had been hidden and unknown to him before. Something that answered to the fear with which she had drawn back from him and to the tremendous and tragic pa.s.sion with which she had given herself to him at the last. Poor little Amy had never held him so. She had never loved him like that in all her poor little life. And so his very tenderness for Kitty had terror in it, lest he should fail her, lest he should in any way justify her prescience of disaster.

Somebody was coming along the Cliff-path, somebody with a telegram for Mrs. Tailleur. She rose, moving away from Lucy as she opened it.

”There is no answer,” she said. And she came to him again and sat beside him, very still, with hands spread over the telegram that lay open in her lap.

”Has anything happened?”

She shook her head. He took the hand that she held out to him by way of rea.s.surance and possession.

”Then why do you look like that?”

She smiled.

”Kitty--that was an unconvincing smile.”

”Was it? I'm sorry to say there's a tiresome man coming to see me.”

”Say you can't see him. Send him a wire.”

”I must. He's coming on business. I don't _want_ to see him.”

”Can't I see him for you, if you feel like that?”

”No, dear. He must see me.”

”When is he due?”

”At seven-thirty.”

”Oh--only in the evening. How long do you think he'll stay?”

Kitty hardened her face. ”Not a minute longer than I can help.”

”An hour? Two hours?”

”I shall have to give him dinner. He's--he's that sort of man.”

”Two hours, probably. I think I'll take Janey for a stroll while he's here. You see, I've got to tell her, and I shall tell her then.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. ”And what will--Janey--say?”