Part 13 (2/2)

It was a curious smile, half-satisfied as one whose prognostications have come true, half-dissatisfied as though there was no great cause for congratulation.

Once Mary was curious enough to ask her why she smiled. Lady Agatha at the piano was playing Wagner like a professional musician. Mrs. Morres's smile grew more inscrutable.

”It amuses me,” she said, talking loudly, so that her words might reach Mary through the storm of the music, ”to find that Agatha is just a woman, after all. It amuses me--and yet--it had been happier for you and me if she had contented herself with the unrealities of life a little longer.”

Mary did not understand at the moment. She began to understand a little later when Mr. Jardine came. The novel, after all, had not been finished. For the last week or so before the visitor arrived her Ladys.h.i.+p had apparently lost interest in it.

”My brain has dried up, Mary,” she said. ”I should only spoil it if I went on. Put it away in a drawer, and when I feel like it we can go on again. You want a rest. I've over-tired you.”

”I felt I couldn't rest till it was done,” Mary said, with a little sigh. ”I wanted to know what became of them all. And it is such an interesting point. Tell me, does Clotilde marry Mark, after all?”

”How should I know? I have nothing to do with what she does. Clotilde knows her own mind. I do not. Wait till we get back to it.”

”Ah! you should finish it--you should finish it. You'll never get that young green world in it again. It was an inspiration. We should have held on to it like Jacob to the angel's robe.”

But for the time Lady Agatha's literary energy was exhausted.

”I daresay there's a deal of fustian in it. There's sure to be,” she said. ”I don't think anything could be really good that was produced with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get your bicycle and I'll walk beside you. I've been cramped up too long.”

This time it was a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile than ever.

At last he came. When the sound of his footstep and of his voice reached them where they stood in the drawing-room awaiting him, her Ladys.h.i.+p turned to Mary, and her face was full of an immense relief.

”I didn't really believe he'd come,” she said. ”I've been feeling quite sure that something would occur to prevent his coming.”

”The weeks have been endless,” Paul Jardine said, coming in and taking her Ladys.h.i.+p's two hands. ”How could you put me off till September? I've had a heavy time. I don't like being made much of by other folk, so I am going out again after Christmas.”

Then, to be sure, Mary knew. The pair leaped to each other as though they had been two halves of one whole separated long ago, and now drawn together in a magnetic rush. Mary had always known that when Lady Agatha attracted she attracted irresistibly; there was no half-way, no haltings, no looking back possible.

”We are out of it, Mary, we two,” Mrs. Morres said, and the smile had become a trifle weak and wavering. ”What do you suppose is going to become of us? Hazels is a pleasant place, and there has always been something of a.s.surance and comfort about Agatha. I had a hard life, my dear, before I came here. Yet what would she do with us? She can't very well take us out to Africa. I, at least, should not know what to do in those places.”

It was a wooing that was not long a-doing. Her Ladys.h.i.+p and Mr. Jardine came in one evening in time for afternoon tea. The days were closing in by this time, and a fire was welcome. There had been rain, and the fire sparkled on her Ladys.h.i.+p's black curls and her eyelashes as she stood by the fire, taking off the long cloak in which she wrapped herself when she went out walking in bad weather. Her eyes were at once bright and shy.

”Congratulate me,” she said. ”He has consented to take me with him. He held out for a long time, but I was determined to go. As though I should take the chances!”

”It is I who am to be congratulated,” said Paul Jardine, and the happiness in his voice thrilled his listeners. ”Of course, I wouldn't have listened to her if she wasn't so splendidly strong. It will be an odd place for a honeymoon. Do you think I ought not to have consented to take her, Mrs. Morres?”

”For how long?”

Mrs. Morres's voice shook. All the Sibylline quality was gone from it now.

”For a year. I must fulfil my engagements. Afterwards I must do my best for them over here. I never thought that I could do as I would as a married man. Do you think I ought not to have consented?”

”She would have gone without your consent.”

Lady Agatha came over and put a hand on her shoulder, a kind, caressing hand.

”You are quite right,” she said. ”Oh, he has wriggled, but it had to be.

It had to be, from the first minute we met.”

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