And--behold!--SHE
had walked past him, and his world was changed for ever. Was it an
illusion of light that made her whole spirit seem to shine through a
half-startled glance? Or a little trick of gait, a swaying, seductive
balance of body; was it the way her hair waved back, or a subtle scent,
as of a flower? What was it? The wife of a squire of those parts, with
a house in London. Her name? It doesn't matter--she has been long
enough dead. There was no excuse--not an ill-treated woman; an ordinary,
humdrum marriage, of three years standing; no children. An amiable good
fellow of a husband, fifteen years older than herself, inclined already
to be an invalid. No excuse! Yet, in one month from that night, Winton
and she were lovers, not only in thought but in deed. A thing so utterly
beyond "good form" and his sense of what was honourable and becoming in
an officer and gentleman that it was simply never a question of weighing
pro and con, the cons had it so completely. And yet from that first
evening, he was hers, she his. For each of them the one thought was how
to be with the other. If so--why did they not at least go off together?
Not for want of his beseeching. And no doubt, if she had survived Gyp's
birth, they would have gone. But to face the prospect of ruining
two men, as it looked to her, had till then been too much for that
soft-hearted creature.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25