“Not quite so much now as before you came,”
she answered. “I am proud, you know, that
you asked me,” and putting her troubles aside,
she smiled at him bravely, as though it was he who
needed comforting. “Good-by! Let me
hear of you through your success.”
So again they said good-by at the time of sunset.
Chayne mounted into the landau and drove back along
the road to Weymouth. “So that’s the
end,” said Sylvia. She opened the door and
passed again into the garden. Through the window
of the library she saw her father and Walter Hine,
watching, it seemed, for her appearance. It was
borne in upon her suddenly that she could not meet
them or speak with them, and she ran very quickly
round the house to the front door, and escaped unaccosted
to her room.
In the library Hine turned to Garratt Skinner with
one of his rare flashes of shrewdness.
“She didn’t want to meet us,” he
said, jealously. “Do you think she cares
for him?”
“I think,” replied Garratt Skinner with
a smile, “that Captain Chayne will not trouble
us with his company again.”
AN OLD PASSION BETRAYS A NEW SECRET
Garratt Skinner, however, was wrong. He was not
aware of the great revolution which had taken place
in Chayne; and he misjudged his tenacity. Chayne,
like many another man, had mapped out his life only
to find that events would happen in a succession different
to that which he had ordained. He had arranged
to devote his youth and the earlier part of his manhood
entirely to his career, if the career were not brought
to a premature end in the Alps. That possibility
he had always foreseen. He took his risks with
full knowledge, setting the gain against them, and
counting them worth while. If then he lived, he
proposed at some indefinite time, in the late thirties,
to fall in love and marry. He had no parents
living; there was the empty house upon the Sussex Downs;
and the small estate which for generations had descended
from father to son. Marriage was thus a recognized
event. Only it was thrust away into an indefinite
future. But there had come an evening which he
had not foreseen, when, sorely grieved by the loss
of his great friend, he had fallen in with a girl
who gave with open hands the sympathy he needed, and
claimed, by her very reticence and humility, his sympathy
in return. A day had followed upon that evening;
and thenceforth the image of Sylvia standing upon
the snow-ridge of the Aiguille d’Argentiere,
with a few strips of white cloud sailing in a blue
sky overhead, the massive pile of Mont Blanc in front,
freed to the sunlight which was her due, remained
fixed and riveted in his thoughts. He began in
imagination to refer matters of moment to her judgment;
he began to save up little events of interest that
he might remember to tell them to her. He understood
that he had a companion, even when he was alone, a
condition which he had not anticipated even for his
late thirties. And he came to the conclusion
that he had not that complete ordering of his life
on which he had counted. He was not, however,
disappointed. He seized upon the good thing which
had come to him with a great deal of wonder and a very
thankful heart; and he was not disposed to let it
lightly go.
