"I don't suppose," said Mrs. Maule, at last looking up, and smiling into Jane's face, "that you've even made up your mind where you will spend your honeymoon?"

She was feeling slightly ashamed,--ashamed and yet exhilarated by this absurd, make-believe conversation.

Jane shut the book she held in her hand, and put it down.

"Athena," she said quietly, "I did not mean to tell you yet, but now I think I had better do so. I am going to break my engagement. I see--of course I can't help seeing--that it's been a mistake from the beginning."

"He was not good enough for you, Jane," said Mrs. Maule impulsively.

"What he wants is a wife who will help him. You did not understand. I saw that from the first----"

Jane went on quickly:

"After all, men--and women, too, I suppose,--often do make that sort of mistake. It's a good thing when they find it out in time--as I have done. But I would rather not talk about it."

She changed the subject abruptly: "I feel rather worried about Mabel Digby. She's really quite ill. I thought of lunching there to-day, if you have no objection."

"Yes, do go there! Surely you know I always want you to do just what you like when you're here?"

Athena's voice sounded oddly loud in her own ears. It seemed to her as if she had lost control over its modulations....

As the door of the library closed behind Jane Oglander, Athena Maule sat down. She felt oppressed, almost scared, by this piece of good fortune.

She had never thought things would be made so easy for her.

How mistaken she had been in Jane's att.i.tude, not only to Hew Lingard, but to life! And how mistaken Lingard had been! Athena could not help feeling a certain contempt for him; but all men, so she reminded herself, are vain where women are concerned. They always put a far higher value on themselves than does the woman on whom they are wasting their pity, their--their remorse.

Why, Jane had shown herself more than reasonable just now. She had made no stupid "fuss," attempted no disagreeable accusations. She hadn't even cried! But then, Jane Oglander was just--Jane; that is a sensible, a thoughtful, to tell truth, a cold creature! Athena, to be sure, had seen her moved, terribly so, over that business of her brother, but all the emotional side of the girl's nature had been exhausted over that sad affair.

What Athena was beginning to long for with all the strength of her being had now entered the domain of immediate possibility.

There would be some disagreeable, difficult moments to go through before she could become Hew Lingard's wife. Mrs. Richard Maule, sitting there in the library of Rede Place, faced that fact with the cool, calculating courage which was perhaps her chief a.s.set in the battle of life.

But she was popular, well liked by a large circle of people; she had little doubt that many of them would take her part--again she reminded herself that it would be very difficult for anyone to do anything else who, knowing her, had ever seen Richard Maule as he now was. She had heard of women doing far stranger things than that she was about to do in order to attain their wish.

She tried to remember the two or three names Mrs. Stanwood had uttered in a similar connection--but they were gone, irretrievably gone from her memory. No matter, the position of a woman whose marriage has been dissolved is quite other than that of a divorcee. Little as she really knew of English sentiment and prejudice, Mrs. Maule could be sure of that.

Athena's violet eyes grew tender. Hew Lingard respected as well as worshipped her; and should her dream, the delightful dream which was now taking such living shape, become reality, should she, that is, become Lingard's wife, she would never, never allow him to regret it.

She renewed, and most solemnly, the vow she had taken two nights ago.

Ah! yes indeed--her wild oats were all sown! Athena Lingard would be a very different woman from Athena Maule. Besides, as Lingard's wife she would be free of England for a while.

She remembered vividly the day that he had casually told her that he expected an appointment abroad, for it had been the first time she had realised how utterly unsuited Jane was to be Lingard's wife.

Athena possessed the confident belief in herself and in her own powers that every beautiful woman is apt early to acquire in her progress through an admiring world. Such a wife as herself would be of immeasurable use to such a man as was Hew Lingard. Of that she could have no doubt.

Hew was not exactly a man of the world, in fact he seemed astonishingly indifferent to other people's opinion. Well, that told two ways. Just now, it was a good thing that he cared so little what others might say or think. Instinct told her that as long as he was at peace with his own conscience, his own sense of honour, Lingard would care mighty little what the world said--besides, the world would have nothing to say. They, she and Lingard, would have to be careful till the legal matter was settled--that was all.

During the long hour that she sat alone in the library of Rede Place, Athena Maule had time to think of many things, for she was no longer anxious or excited now--everything was going well. The rest, to such a woman as herself, presented no real difficulty.

She dwelt with a feeling of exultation on the thought of the punishment she was going to inflict on Richard. She wondered idly whether the step she was about to take would affect her marriage settlements. They had been splendid--with none of those tiresome "if and if clauses" that she was told settlements often contain. Well, that was a matter of comparatively small consequence. From what she knew of Lingard, it was unlikely that he would allow her to continue in receipt of another man's money. From a practical point of view it was a pity, of course, that Hew was like that, but she liked him the better for it.

She could not, as yet, form any very definite plan of action. There was plenty of time for that now that Jane was out of the way. She would go to London--London was very pleasant at this time of year--and once there she would get one of her clever friends to recommend her a really good lawyer.

Constructive thought--thought such as Athena had now been indulging in for an hour--is a fatiguing mental process. She felt tired, and quite ready for lunch, the princ.i.p.al meal of her day, when the gong sounded.

But before going off to her solitary meal, Mrs. Maule went over to that portion of the library where were kept several rows of old law books that had belonged to d.i.c.k Wantele's father. She marked the place where stood a solid volume inscribed, "A Digest of the Marriage Laws of England."

When she had a quiet hour to spare, and when no one was likely to see her engaged on the task, she would take that book down, and study it carefully: it doubtless contained information as to several matters of which she was as yet ignorant, and which it now behoved her to know.

CHAPTER XV

"... that supreme disintegrant, the Tyranny of Love...."

The Small Farm had become dear to Jane during the long miserable days she had lived through in the last fortnight. She had gone there whenever she wanted to escape from the intolerable pain of seeing Lingard's absorption in Athena Maule.

Each of the familiar rooms of Rede Place now held for her some bitter, some humiliating a.s.sociation. She never took refuge in her own room upstairs without remembering the long, intimate talk with Athena the evening of her arrival when she had been compelled to reveal more of her inner self than she had ever done in response to the other woman's curiously insistent, eager questioning.

Yes, no doubt Athena was right. Hew Lingard probably regarded a suitable marriage as a necessity of his career. She, Jane, had misunderstood him from the very first, proving herself, so she told herself with shamed anguish, a romantic fool.

In the region of the emotions there are certain secret ordeals which must be faced in solitude. Hew Lingard had taught Jane Oglander what love between a man and woman can come to mean. She had been ready not only to give all--but to receive all. This being so, she could not bring herself to endure the marriage of convenience she now believed to be all he sought of her.

She would have given all the exquisite happiness of the last two years--happiness the greater and the more intense because it was so largely bred of her imagination--to blot out the week she and Lingard had spent together in London. It was during those days she had learnt to love him in the simple human way which now made the thought of parting agony.

Unwittingly Lingard had done her a terrible mischief during those enchanted days. She felt as if he had stolen her from herself, rifling all the hidden chambers of her heart. She had given everything in exchange for what she had believed to be the great, the sacred, treasure of his love. And now he was scattering the treasure which she had thought hers at the feet of another woman who, she believed, had not sought it and to whom it was dross.

She had heard of such enthralments--a blunderer had so tried to excuse, to explain to her, her brother Jack Oglander's crime. Yes, Jack had been mad about that woman he had killed; that had been the word used--mad.

Mad? Jane Oglander, walking to the Small Farm, repeated the word--yes, Lingard had been made mad by Athena in much the same way as Jack had been made mad. When Lingard had implored her to marry him at once, during that hour on The Hanger, he had really been beseeching her to help him to escape. She saw that now--and perhaps, had she loved him less, she would have yielded.

But there are moments when love, though the most dissembling of the pa.s.sions, cannot lie. Jane Oglander, when in her lover's arms, could not accept as gold the baser metal he, perhaps unknowingly, pressed upon her.

One thing remained to her. Nothing could take away from her the two years which had gone before. She had not yet destroyed, she did not feel that she need be called upon to destroy--until Lingard married some other woman--the letters he had written to her in those two years. She told herself that they had not been love letters, although to her simple heart they had seemed strangely like it.

Any day during the past two years she might have opened a paper containing the news of Lingard's death. But if that of which she had had so sick a dread had happened, she would have had something dear, something intimately secret and sacred, to bear about with her, locked in the inner shrine of her heart, for the rest of her life.

The present and the immediate future must be considered, and, as she had now told Athena of her decision, they must be considered to-day.

She remembered the many broken engagements of which she had heard--Jane wondered if those other women had suffered as she was suffering now.

The one thing she felt she could not do would be to go back to that little house in London, which to her would ever be filled with Hew Lingard--not Lingard as he was now, gloomy, preoccupied, avoiding her presence and yet painfully eager to obey her slightest wish--but Lingard the happy, the masterful lover who yet had been so tender, so patient with her.

What did other people do when they broke off an engagement or--or were jilted?

Jane tried to remember what she had heard such people did. One girl had been sent on a voyage round the world--another had refused to leave home, she had stayed and "faced it out."