She knew herself sane. Yet the decision was not arrived at when Sir Seymour rang the bell. Now he was waiting in the room underneath and the matter must be settled. An effort of will, the descent of a flight of stairs, a sentence spoken, and her life would be made fast to an anchor which would hold. And for her there would be no more drifting upon dangerous seas at the mercy of tempests.

"Look at him once more and then decide."

The voice persisted within her monotonously. But what an absurd injunction that was. She knew Seymour by heart, knew every feature of him, every expression of his keen, observant, but affectionate eyes, the way he held himself, the shapes of his strong, rather broad hands--the hands of a fine horseman and first-rate whip--every trick of him, every att.i.tude. Why look at him, her old familiar friend, again before deciding what she was now going to do?

"Look at him as the man who is going to be your husband!"

But that was surely a deceiving insidious voice, suggesting to her weakness, uncertainty, hesitation, further mental torment and further debate. And she was afraid of it.

She stood still near the window. She must go down. Seymour had already been waiting some time, ten minutes or more. He must be wondering why she did not come. He was not the sort of man one cares to keep waiting--although he had waited many years scarcely daring to hope for something he longed for. She thought of his marvellous happiness, his wonderful surprise, if she did what she meant--or did she mean it--to do. Surely it would be a splendid thing to bring such a flash of radiance into a life of twilight. Does happiness come from making others happy? If so, then--She must go down.

"I will do it!" she said to herself. "Merely his happiness will be enough reward."

And she went towards the door. But as she did so her apprehension grew till her body tingled with it. A strange sensation of being physically unwell came upon her. She shrank, as if physically, from the clutching hands of the irrevocable. If in a hurry, driven by her demon, she were to say the words she had in her mind there would be no going back. She would never dare to unsay them. She knew that. But that was just the great advantage she surely was seeking--an irrevocable safety from herself, a safety she would never be able to get away from, break out of.

In a prison there is safety from all the dangers and horrors of the world outside the prison. But what a desperate love of the state she now called freedom burned within her! Freedom for what, though? She knew and felt as if her soul were slowly reddening. It was monstrous that thought of hers. Yet she could not help having it. It was surely not her fault if she had it. Was she a sort of monster unlike all other women of her age? Or did many of them, too, have such thoughts?

She must go down. And she went to the door and opened it. And directly she saw the landing outside and the descending staircase she knew that she had not yet decided, that she could not decide till she had looked at Seymour once more, looked at him with the almost terrible eyes of the deeply experienced woman who can no longer decide a thing swiftly in ignorance.

"I shall do it," she said to herself. "But I must be reasonable, and there is no reason why I should force myself to make up my mind finally up here. I have sent for Seymour and I know why. When I see him, when I am with him, I shall do what I intended to do when I asked him to come."

She shut her bedroom door and began to go downstairs, and as she went she imagined Seymour settled in that house with her. (For, of course, he would come to live in Berkeley Square, would leave the set of rooms he occupied now in St. James's Palace.) She had often longed to have a male companion living with her in that house, to smell cigar smoke, to hear a male voice, a strong footstep in the hall and on the stairs, to see things that implied a man's presence lying about, caps, pipes, walking sticks, golf clubs, riding crops. The whole atmosphere of the house would be changed if a man came to live with her there, if Seymour came.

But--her liberty?

She had gained the last stair and was on the great landing before the drawing-room door. Down below she heard a faint and discreet murmur of voices from Murgatroyd and the footman in the hall. And as she paused for a moment she wondered how much those two men knew of her and of her real character, whether they had any definite knowledge of her humanity, whether they had perhaps realized in their way what sort of woman she was, sometimes stripped away the _Grande Dame_, the mistress, and looked with appraising eyes at the stark woman.

She would never know.

She opened the door and instantly a.s.sumed her usual carelessly friendly look.

Sir Seymour had left the fire, and was sitting in an armchair with a book in his hand reading when she came in; and as she had opened the door softly, and as it was a long way from the fireplace he did not hear her or instantly realize that she was there. She had an instant in which to contemplate him as he sat there, like a man quietly at home. Only one lamp was lit. It stood on a table behind him and threw light on his rather big head thickly covered with curly and snow-white hair, the hair which he sometimes smilingly called his "cauliflower." The light fell, too, aslant on his strong-featured manly face, the slightly hooked nose, large-lipped, firm mouth, shaded by a moustache in which some dark hairs were mingled with the white ones, and chin with a deep dent in the middle of it. His complexion was of that weather-beaten red hue which is often seen in oldish men who have been much out in all weathers. There were many deep lines in the face, two specially deep ones slanting downwards from the nose on either side of the mouth. Above the nose there was a sort of b.u.mp, from which the low forehead slightly retreated to the curves of strong white hair. The ears were large but well shaped.

In order to read he had put on pince-nez with tortoise-sh.e.l.l rimmed gla.s.ses, from which hung a rather broad black riband. His thin figure looked stiff even in an arm-chair. His big brown-red hands held the book up. His legs were crossed, and his feet were strongly defined by the snowy white spats which partially concealed the varnished black boots.

He looked a distinguished old man as he sat there--but he looked old.

"Is it possible that I look at all that sort of age?" was Lady Sellingworth's thought as, for a brief instant, she contemplated him, with an intensity, a sort of almost fierce sharpness which she was scarcely aware of.

He looked up, made a twitching movement; his pince-nez fell to his black coat, and he got up alertly.

"Adela!"

She shut the door and went towards him, and as she did so she thought:

"If I had seen Alick Craven sitting there reading!"

"I was having a look at this."

He held up the book. It was Baudelaire's "_Les Fleurs du Mal_."

"Not the book for you!" she said. "Though your French is so good."

"No."

He laid it down, and she noticed the tangle of veins on his hand.

"The dandy in literature doesn't appeal to me. I must say many of these poets strike me as decadent fellows, not helped to anything like real manliness by their gifts."

She sat down on the sofa, just where she had sat to have those long talks with Craven about Waring and Italy, the sea people, the colours of the sails on those ships which look magical in sunsets, which move on as if bearing argosies from gorgeous hidden lands of the East.

"But never mind Baudelaire," he continued, and his eyes, heavily lidded and shrouded by those big bushy eyebrows which seem to sprout almost with ardent violence as the body grows old, looked at her with melting kindness. "What have you been doing, my dear? The old dog wants to know.

There is something on your mind, isn't there?"

Lady Sellingworth had once said to Sir Seymour that he reminded her of a big dog, and he had laughed and said that he was a big dog belonging to her. Since that day, when he wrote to her, he had often signed himself "the old dog." And often she had thought of him almost as one thinks of a devoted dog, absolutely trustworthy, ready for instant attack on your enemies, faithful with unquestioning faithfulness through anything.

As he spoke he gently took her hand, and she thought, "If Alick Craven were taking my hand!"

The touch of his skin was warm and very dry. It gave her a woman's thoughts, not to be told of.

"What is it?" he asked.

Very gently she released her hand, and as she did so she looked on it almost sternly.

"Why?" she said. "Do I look unhappy--or what? Sit down, Seymour dear."

She seemed to add the last word with a sort of pressure, with almost self-conscious intention.

He drew the tails of his braided morning coat forward with both hands and sat down, and she thought, "How differently a young man sits down!"

"Unhappy!" he said, in his quiet and strong, rather deep voice.

He looked at her with the scrutinizing eyes of affection, whose gaze sometimes is so difficult to bear. And she felt that something within her was writhing under his eyes.

"I don't think you often look happy, Adela. No; it isn't that. But you look to-day as if you had been going through something which had tried your nerves--some crisis."

He paused. She remained silent and looked at his hands and then at his eyelids and eyebrows. And there was a terrible coldness in her scrutiny, which she did not show to him, but of which she was painfully aware.

His nails were not flat, but were noticeably curved. For a moment the thought in her mind was simply, "Could I live with those nails?"

She hated herself for that thought; she despised herself for it; she considered herself almost inhuman and certainly despicable, and she recalled swiftly what Seymour was, the essential beauty and fineness of his character, his truth, his touching faithfulness. And almost simultaneously she thought, "Why do old men get those terribly bushy eyebrows, like thickets?"

"Perhaps I think too much," she said. "Living alone, one thinks--and thinks. You have so much to do and I so little."

"Sometimes I think of retiring," he said.

"From the court?"

"Yes."

"Oh, but they would never let you!"

"My place could be filled easily enough."