Trouble, self-scorn overwhelmed him. Recalling
all his promises to himself, all his assurances to
Lady Tonbridge, he stood convicted, as the sentry
who has shut his eyes and let the invader pass.
Monstrous!—that in his position, with this
difference of age between them, he should have allowed
such ideas to grow and gather head. Beautiful
wayward creature!—all the more beguiling,
because of the Difficulties that bristled round her.
His common sense, his judgment were under no illusions
at all about Delia Blanchflower. And yet—
This then was passion!—which must
be held down and reasoned down. He would reason
it down. She must and should marry a man of her
own generation—youth with youth. And,
moreover, to give way to these wild desires would
be simply to alienate her, to destroy all his own power
with her for good.
The ghostly presence of his life came to him.
He cried out to her, made appeal to her, in sackcloth
and ashes. And then, in some mysterious, heavenly
way she was revealed to him afresh; not as an enemy
whom he had offended, not as a lover slighted, but
as his best and tenderest friend. She closed
no gates against the future:—that was for
himself to settle, if closed they were to be.
She seemed to walk with him, hand in hand, sister
with brother—in a deep converse of souls.
Gertrude Marvell was sitting alone at the Maumsey
breakfast-table, in the pale light of a December day.
All around her were letters and newspapers, to which
she was giving an attention entirely denied to her
meal. She opened them one after another, with
a frown or a look of satisfaction, classifying them
in heaps as she read, and occasionally remembering
her coffee or her toast. The parlourmaid waited
on her, but knew very well—and resented
the knowledge—that Miss Marvell was scarcely
aware of her existence, or her presence in the room.
But presently the lady at the table asked—
“Is Miss Blanchflower getting up?”
“She will be down directly, Miss.”
Gertrude’s eyebrows rose, unconsciously.
She herself was never late for an 8:30 breakfast,
and never went to bed till long after midnight.
The ways of Delia, who varied between too little sleep
and the long nights of fatigue, seemed to her self-indulgent.
After her letters had been put aside and the ordinary
newspapers, she took up a new number of the Tocsin.
The first page was entirely given up to an article
headed “How LONG?” She read it with care,
her delicate mouth tightening a little. She herself
had suggested the lines of it a few days before, to
the Editor, and her hints had been partially carried
out. It gave a scathing account of Sir Wilfrid’s
course on the suffrage question—of his
earlier coquettings with the woman’s cause,
his defection and “treachery,” the bitter
and ingenious hostility with which he was now pursuing
