Nan lay long awake that night.  Roger’s sudden gust of passion had taken her by surprise, filling her with a kind of terror of him.  Never before had he shown her that side of himself, and she had somehow taken it for granted that he would not prove a demanding lover.  He had been so diffident, so generous at the beginning, that she had been almost ashamed of the poor return which was all that she could make.  But now she was suddenly face to face with the fact that he was going to demand far more of her than she was able to give.

She had not realised how much propinquity adds fuel to love’s fire.  Unknown, even to himself, Roger’s passion had been gradually rising towards flood-tide.  Man being by nature a contradictory animal, the attitude assumed by his mother and cousin towards the woman who was to be his wife had seemed to fan rather than smother the flame.

All at once the curb had snapped.  He wanted Nan, the same Nan with whom he had fallen in love—­the inconsequent feminine thing of elusive frocks and absurd, delicious faults and weaknesses—­rather than a Nan moulded into shape by Lady Gertrude’s iron hand.  An intense resentment of his mother’s interference had been gradually growing up within him.  He would do all the moulding that was required, after matrimony!

Not that he put all this to himself in so many words.  But a sense of revolt, an overwhelming jealousy of everyone who made any claim at all on Nan—­jealousy even of that merry Bohemian life of hers in which he had had no share—­had been slowly gathering within him until it was almost more than he could endure.  Isobel’s taunts at dinner had half maddened him.  Whether he were Philistine or not, Nan had promised to marry him, and he would know neither rest nor peace of mind until that promise were fulfilled.

And Nan, as she lay in bed with wide eyes staring into the darkness, felt as though the door of the cage were slowly closing upon her.

CHAPTER XXI

LADY GERTRUDE’S POINT OF VIEW

It was a cheerless morning.  Gusts of fine, sprinkling rain drove hither and thither on a blustering wind, while overhead hung a leaden sky with patches of black cloud scudding raggedly across it.

Nan, coming slowly downstairs to breakfast, regarded the state of the weather as merely in keeping with everything else.  The constant friction of her visit to Trenby had been taking its daily toll of her natural buoyancy, and last night’s interview with Roger had tried her frayed nerves to the uttermost.  This morning, after an almost sleepless night, she felt that to remain there any longer would be more than she could endure.  She must get away—­secure at least a few days’ respite from the dreadful atmosphere of disapprobation and dislike which Lady Gertrude managed to convey.

The consciousness of it was never absent from her.  Pride had upheld her so far, but underneath the pride lay a very sore heart.  To anyone as sensitive as Nan, whose own lovableness had always hitherto evoked both love and friendship as naturally as flowers open to the sun, it was a new and bewildering experience to be disliked.  She did not know how to meet it.  It hurt inexpressibly, and she was tired of being hurt.