When Geoffrey entered the drawing-room, and Margaret Copley with instinctive delicacy withdrew, he did not at first perceive that his wife was present. In another moment, however, he caught sight of her, seated at the little table in the furthest corner of the room, apparently engrossed in a book. His heart throbbed with disappointment, wounded feeling, and even some mixture of indignation; but he controlled himself, and determined to give her a chance. “Marion,” he said, “I am going to take off my wet things, but I have just looked in to tell you I am all right. You heard me come just now, I suppose? Lady Anne and all the others were at the door to meet me. I’m afraid I have given you all a very uncomfortable evening, but it was Coquette’s fault, not mine. However, all’s well that ends well, and I flatter myself the beauty has had a lesson that she won’t forget in a hurry.” He went on speaking in a half nervous manner, for Marion did not appear at first to hear him. When he left off she raised her eyes from her book, and said, in the provokingly indifferent, half-awake tone of a person still engrossed in the pages from which the attention is hardly withdrawn: “I beg your pardon, Geoffrey. I did not hear you come into the room. Was it I you were speaking to? Yes, I heard your horse come up to the door. What a fuss Lady Anne gets into for nothing at all! Hadn’t you better go and change your things?” And without giving him time to reply, her eyes were again bent on her book. Geoffrey looked at her for a moment without speaking. She felt his gaze fixed on her, she felt, though he could not see, the expression of his face. Almost she felt inclined to spring up and run towards him to ask his forgiveness, to tell him of the anxiety she had endured, the genuine relief she had experienced when she heard of his safe return. “But he would not believe you,” whispered the evil spirit she had been listening to. “Why lower yourself thus unnecessarily to one who no longer cares for you?” And Marion gave heed to the specious suggestion, and the opportunity faded away into the mournful crowd of things that might have been—good deeds never done, loving words never spoken. The remainder of their visit at Copley Wood passed quietly and uneventfully, but Marion was glad when it came to an end. She felt that she had fallen back in her friends’ good opinion; evidently they too thought her heartless and disagreeable, cold and selfish, reserved to an unwomanly degree.