“You have your own--happiness.”
He hesitated on the word. A quick glance assured her of his
ingenuousness. She longed to undeceive him, to shriek out her
heartlessness, her contempt for herself and for her life. But pride and
loyalty to Morland restrained her within bounds of sanity. She assented
to his proposition with a gesture of the shapely hand that lay on the
tea-table absently tracing the pattern of the cloth.
“Yes, I have that. But it isn't the fairyland of those two children. You
yourself say there is nothing like it in the world. You don't know how
I pine for it sometimes--for the things that are sweet and clean and
untainted and pure as a mountain spring. They don't come my way. They
never will.”
“You are wrong,” said Jimmie. “Love will bring them all to you--that and
a perfect wedded life and little children.”
For a flash she raised her eyes and looked full into his, and for the
first time the love in the man's heart surged tumultuously. It rose of a
sudden, without warning, flooding his being, choking him. What it was of
yearning, despair, passion, horror that he saw in her eyes he knew not.
He did not read in them the craving of a starved soul for food. To
him their burning light was a mystery. All that ever reached his
consciousness was that it was a look such as he had never before beheld
in a woman's face; and against his will and against his reason it acted
like some dark talisman and unlocked floodgates. He clenched the arms of
the wickerwork chair, and bit his lip hard, and stared at the ground.
Norma broke into a hard laugh, and lay back in her chair.
“You must be thinking me a great fool,” she said, in her usual mocking
tones. “When a woman tries to swim in sentiment, she flounders, and
either drowns or has to be lugged ignominiously to shore. She can't swim
like a man. Thanks for the rescue, Mr. Padgate.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“What do you mean?” he said curtly.
“I'm back on dry land. Oh! it is safer for me. There I am protected by
my little bodyguard of three--the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I
can't get on without them.”
Jimmie leaped from his chair and brought his clenched hands down to his
sides in a passionate gesture.
“Stop talking like that, I say!” he cried imperiously.
Then meeting her scared and indignant glance, he bowed somewhat wide of
her.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, in a tone of no great apology, and marched
out of the little temple and along the gravelled walk of the terrace.
Flight, or the loss of self-control, was his only alternative. What she
thought of him he did not care. The sense of increasing distance from
her alone brought security to his soul.
At the further end he met Mrs. Deering just back from her drive.
“Why, what is the matter, Jimmie?” she asked, twirling an idle sunshade
over her pretty head, for the terrace was in deep afternoon shadow.
“Nothing,” he replied, with a ghastly attempt at a smile. “I am going
for a walk before dinner.”