The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection. Glyn Elinor

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СКАЧАТЬ is going into the country they won't meet," reasoned Anne. "You saw the dreadful-looking husband just now. Will he be the colonial who will object, do you think, or the English snob who won't?"

      But the Crow refused to give any more opinions except in general.

      It all came, he said, from the ridiculous marriage laws in this over-civilized country. Why should not people eminently suited to each other be allowed to be happy?

      "It is too bad, Crow," said Anne. "You take it for granted that Hector has the most dishonorable intentions towards Mrs. Brown. He may worship her quite in the abstract."

      "Fiddle-dee-dee, my child!" said Colonel Lowerby. "Look at him! You don't understand the fundamental principles of human nature if you say that. When a man is madly in love with a woman, nature says, 'This is your mate,' not a saint of alabaster on a church altar. There are numbers of animals about who find a 'mate' in every woman they come across. But Hector is not that sort. Look at his face--look at him now they are passing us, and tell me if you see any abstract about it?"

      Anne was forced to admit she did not; and it was with intense uneasiness she saw her brother and his partner stop, and disappear through one of the doors towards the supper-room.

      When her mother perceived the situation--or Morella--disagreeable moments would begin at once for everybody!

      Meanwhile, the culprits were extremely happy.

      With the finest and noblest intention in the world, Theodora was too young, and too healthy, not to have become exhilarated with the dance and the scene. Something whispered, Why should she not enjoy herself to-night? What harm could there be in dancing? Every one danced--and Josiah, himself, had left her alone.

      Hector had not said a word that she must rebuke him for; they had just waltzed and thrilled, and been--happy!

      And now she was going to eat some supper with him, and forget there were any to-morrows.

      They found a secluded corner, and spent half an hour in perfect peace. Hector was an artist in pleasing women--and to-night, though he never once transgressed in words, she could feel through it all that he loved her--loved her madly. His voice was so tender and deep, and his thought for her slightest wish and comfort so evident; he was masterful, too, and settled what she was to do--where to sit, and now and then he made her look at him.

      He was just so wildly happy he could not stop to count the cost; and while he worshipped her more deeply than when they had sat on the soft greensward at Versailles, even the whole sight of her pure soul now could not stop him--now he knew she loved him, and that there were possible others on the scene. She had trusted him--had appealed to his superior strength; he did not forget that fact quite--but here at a ball was not the place to analyze what it would mean. They were just two guests dancing and supping like the rest, and were supremely content.

      He found out where she was going for Whitsuntide, but said nothing of his own intentions.

      The blindness and madness of love was upon him and held him in complete bondage. The first shock, which her look of the wounded fawn had given him, was over. They had suffered, and made good resolutions, and parted, and now they had met again. And he could not, and would not, think where they might drift to.

      To be near her, to look into her eyes, to be conscious of her personality was what he asked at the moment, what he must have. The rest of time was a blank, and meaningless. It is not every man who loves in this way--fortunately for the rest of the world! Many go through life with now and then a different woman merely as an episode, as far as anything but a physical emotion is concerned. Sport, or their own ambitions, fill up their real interests, and no woman could break their hearts.

      But Hector was not of these. And this woman had it in her power to make his heaven or hell.

      They had both passed through moments of exalted sentiment, even a little dramatic in their tragedy and renunciation, but circumstance is stronger always than any highly strung emotion of good or evil. At the end of their good-bye at Madrid their story should have closed, as the stories in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama. They so seldom tell of the flatness of the afterwards. The impossibility of retaining a balance on this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not be turned out with the ring-down of the curtain.

      Unless death finishes what is apparently the last act, there is always the to-morrow to be reckoned with--out of the story-book. So while exalted--he by his sudden worship of that pure sweetness of soul in Theodora which he had discovered, she by her innocence and desire to do right--they had been able to tune their minds to an idea of a tender good-bye, full of sentiment and vows of abstract devotion, and adherence to duty.

      And if he had gone to the ends of the earth that night the exaltation, as a memory, might have continued, and time might have healed their hurts--time and the starvation of absence and separation. But fate had decreed they should meet again, and soon; and all the forces which precipitate matters should be employed for their undoing.

      For all else in life Hector was no weakling. He had always been a strong man, physically and morally.

      His views were the views of the world. It seemed no great sin to him to love another man's wife. All his friends did the same at one period or another.

      It was only when Theodora had awakened him that he had begun even to think of controlling himself.

      It was to please her, not because he was really convinced of the right and necessity of their course of action, that he had said good-bye and agreed to worship her in the abstract.

      He had been highly moved and elevated by her that night in Paris. And when he wrote the letter his honest intention had been to follow its words.

      He did not recognize the fact that without the zeal of blind faith as to the right, human nature must always yield to inclination.

      So they sat there and ate their supper, and forgot to-morrow, and were radiantly happy.

      As they had gone down the stairs Monica Ellerwood had joined Lady Bracondale in the gallery above.

      "Oh! Look, Aunt Milly!" she had said. "Hector is with the American I told you about in Paris. Do you see, going down to supper. Oh, isn't she pretty! and what jewels--look!"

      And Lady Bracondale had moved forward in a manner quite foreign to her usual dignity to catch sight of them.

      "It is the same woman he talked to at the opera last night," she said. "She is not an American, but a Mrs. Brown, an Australian millionaire's wife, we were told. She is certainly pretty. Oh--eh--you said Hector was devoted to her in Paris?"

      "Why, of course! You can ask Jack."

      "I do not think we need worry, though, dear, because I am happy to say Hector shows great signs of wishing to be with Morella."

      And with this pleasing thought she had turned the conversation.

      "I think we must go back now," said Theodora, after she had finished the last monster strawberry on her plate. "Josiah may be waiting for me."

      Oh, СКАЧАТЬ