When she had gone, Markey sat down
opposite Betty, Gyp's old nurse. The stout woman was still crying in a
quiet way. It gave him the fair hump, for he felt inclined to howl like
a dog himself. After watching her broad, rosy, tearful face in silence
for some minutes, he shook his head, and, with a gulp and a tremor of
her comfortable body, Betty desisted. One paid attention to Markey.
Winton went first into his daughter's bedroom, and gazed at its emptied
silken order, its deserted silver mirror, twisting viciously at his
little moustache. Then, in his sanctum, he sat down before the fire,
without turning up the light. Anyone looking in, would have thought he
was asleep; but the drowsy influence of that deep chair and cosy fire
had drawn him back into the long-ago. What unhappy chance had made him
pass HER house to-day!
Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no case--of a man, at
least--made bankrupt of passion by a single love. In theory, it may
be so; in fact, there are such men--neck-or-nothing men, quiet and
self-contained, the last to expect that nature will play them such a
trick, the last to desire such surrender of themselves, the last to
know when their fate is on them. Who could have seemed to himself, and,
indeed, to others, less likely than Charles Clare Winton to fall over
head and ears in love when he stepped into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at
Grantham that December evening, twenty-four years ago? A keen soldier,
a dandy, a first-rate man to hounds, already almost a proverb in his
regiment for coolness and for a sort of courteous disregard of women as
among the minor things of life--he had stood there by the door, in no
hurry to dance, taking a survey with an air that just did not give an
impression of "side" because it was not at all put on.
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