For he was haggard and worn, as she had never seen him, with dark lines under his eyes, and an air of prostration and fatigue.

"No, I'm very well. It's Nan--my wife," he said, avoiding her alarmed gaze.

"I am sorry--very sorry. Is she----"

"She has been on the brink of death. There is some hope now. I don't know why I came here unless it was to tell you so," said Sydney, with an odd abruptness which seemed to be a.s.sumed in order to mask some unusually strong feeling. "I suppose you know that the man Johnson came to see me----"

"Yes: they have gone," said Lettice, quickly. "They were married yesterday, and sailed this morning."

"Ah! Well, _she_ was in the room when he--made his communication to me.

I did not know it--Johnson never knew it at all. She had been asleep--but she woke and heard what he said. She fainted--and she has been ill ever since." He added a few words concerning the technicalities of his wife's case.

"Oh, Sydney!--my poor Sydney! I am so sorry," said Lettice, her eyes full of tears. For she saw, by his changed manner, something of what his trouble had been, and she instantly forgot all causes of complaint against him. He was sitting sideways on a chair, with his head on his hand; and when she put her arms round his neck and kissed him, he did not repulse her--indeed, he kissed her in return, and seemed comforted by her caress.

"I can't even see her," he went on. "She faints if I go into the room.

How long do you think it will last, Lettice? Will she ever get over it, do you think?"

"If she loves you, I think she will, Sydney. But you must give her time.

No doubt it was a great shock to her," said Lettice.

He looked at her a.s.sentingly, and then stared out of the window as if absorbed in thought. The result of his reflections seemed to be summed up in a short sentence which, certainly, Lettice had never expected to hear from Sydney's lips:--

"I can't think how I came to be such a d.a.m.ned fool. I beg your pardon, Lettice; but it's true."

"Can I be of any use to you--or to her?"

"Thank you, I don't think so--just yet. I don't know--"

heavily--"whether she will want you some day to tell her all you know."

"Oh, no, Sydney!"

"You must do just what you think best about it. I shall put no barriers in the way. Perhaps she had better know everything now."

Then he roused himself a little and looked at her kindly.

"How are you getting on?" he said. "Writing as usual?"

"Yes, I am busy, and doing very well."

"You look thin and f.a.gged."

"Oh, Sydney, if you could but see yourself!"

He smiled at this, and then rose to go.

"But you will stay and have tea with me? Do, Sydney--if only," and Lettice's voice grew low and deep, "if only in token that there is peace between us."

So he stayed; and, although they spoke no more of the matters that were dearest to their hearts, Lettice's bitterness of feeling towards her brother disappeared, and Sydney felt vaguely comforted in his trouble by her sympathy.

She did not tell him of the strange marriage-scene which she had witnessed the day before--when Milly, almost hysterical from over-wrought feeling, had vowed to be a true and faithful wife to the man who had pitied and succored her in the time of her sorest need: of Johnson's stolid demeanor, covering a totally unexpected fund of good-feeling and romance; or of his extraordinary desire, which Lettice had seen carried out, that the baby should be present at its mother's wedding, and should receive--poor little mite--a fatherly kiss from him as soon as he had kissed the forlorn and trembling bride. For Milly, although she professed to like and respect Michael Johnson, shrank somewhat from the prospect of life in another country, and was nervous and excitable to a degree which rather alarmed her mistress. Lettice confessed on reflection, however, that Johnson knew exactly how to manage poor little Milly; and that he had called smiles to her face in the very midst of a last flood of tears; and that she had no fear for the girl's ultimate happiness. Johnson had behaved in a very straightforward, manly and considerate way; and in new surroundings, in a new country, with a kind husband and good prospects, Milly was likely to lead a very happy and comfortable life. Lettice was glad to think so; and was more sorry to see the baby go than to part from Milly. Indeed, she had offered to adopt it; but Johnson was so indignant, and Milly so tearful, at the idea, that she had been forced to relinquish her desire.

All this, however, she withheld from Sydney; as also her expedition to the station to see the little party start for Liverpool, and Milly's grief at parting with the forbearing mistress whom she had once deceived, and who had been, after all, her truest friend.

Nan began, very slowly, but surely, to amend; and Sydney, going back to his usual pursuits, seemed busier than ever.

But, in spite of himself, he was haunted night and day by the fear of what would happen next; of what Nan meant to do when she grew strong.

Would she ever forgive him? And if she did not forgive him, what would she do? Tell the whole story to Sir John, and insist on returning to her brother's house? That would be an extreme thing, and Sir John--who was a man of the world--would probably pooh pooh her virtuous indignation; but Nan had a way of carrying out her resolves whether Sir John pooh-poohed them or not. And supposing that Nan separated herself from him, Sydney could not but see that a very serious imputation would be thrown on his character, even if the true story were not known in all its details.

That mock marriage--which he had not at first supposed that Milly had taken seriously--had a very ugly sound. And he had made too many enemies for the thing to be allowed to drop if once it came to the light.

His career was simply at the mercy of two women--the Johnsons were not, he thought, likely to break silence--and if either of them should prove to be indiscreet or vindictive, he was a ruined man. He had injured and insulted his sister: he had shocked and horrified his wife. What Nan though of him he could not tell. He had always believed that women were too small-minded to forget an injury, to forgive an insult, or to keep silence regarding their husbands' transgressions. If Nan once enlisted Sir John's sympathies on her side, he knew that, although he might ultimately recover from the blow inflicted by his brother-in-law's offense and anger, his chance of success in life would be diminished.

And for what a cause? He writhed as he thought of the pa.s.sing, contemptuous fancy, for the indulgence of which he might have to sacrifice so much and had already sacrificed part of what was dearest in life to him. Yes, he told himself, he was at Nan's mercy, and he had not hitherto found women very ready to hold their hands when weapons had been put into them, and all the instincts of outraged vanity made them strike.

Sydney Campion prided himself on a wide experience of men and women, and a large acquaintance with human nature. But he did not yet know Nan.

The story which had been so suddenly unfolded to her had struck her to the earth with the force of a blow, for more than one reason, but chiefly because she had trusted Sydney so completely. She was not so ignorant of the ways of men as to believe that their lives were always free from stain; indeed she knew more than most girls of the weakness and wickedness of mankind, partly because she was well acquainted with many Vanebury working-people, who were her tenants, partly because Lady Pynsent was a woman of the world and did not choose that Nan should go about with her eyes closed, and partly because she read widely and had never been restricted in the choice of books. She was not a mere ignorant child, shrinking from knowledge as if it were contamination, and blindly believing in the goodness and innocence of all men. But this theoretical acquaintance with the world had not saved her from the error into which women are apt to fall--the error of setting up her lover on a pedestal and believing that he was not as other men. She was punished for her mistake, she told herself bitterly, by finding that he was even worse, not better, than other men, whose weaknesses she had contemned.

For there had been a strain of meanness and cruelty in Sydney's behavior to the girl whom he had ruined which cut his wife to the heart. She had been taught, and she had tried--with some misgiving--to believe that she ought to be prepared to condone a certain amount of levity, of "wildness," even, in her husband's past; but here she saw deliberate treachery, cold-blooded selfishness, which startled her from her dream of happiness. Nan was a little too logical for her own peace of mind.

She could not look at an action as an isolated fact in a man's life: it was an outcome of character. What Sydney had done showed Sydney as he was. And, oh, what a fall was there! how different from the ideal that she had hoped to see realized in him!

It never once occurred to Nan to take either Sir John or Lady Pynsent into her confidence. Sydney was quite mistaken in thinking that she would fly to them for consolation. She would have shrunk sensitively from telling them any story to his discredit. Besides, she shrewdly suspected that they would not share her disappointment, her sense of disillusion; Sir John had more than once laughed in an oddly amused way when she dropped a word in praise of Sydney's high-mindedness and generous zeal for others. "Campion knows which side his bread's b.u.t.tered," he had once made her angry by saying. She had not the slightest inclination to talk to them of Sydney's past life and character.

Besides, she knew well enough that she had no actual cause of complaint in the eyes of the world. Her husband was not bound to tell her all that happened to him before he met her; and he had severed all connection with that unhappy young woman before he asked her, Anna Pynsent, to be his wife. Nan's grievance was one of those intangible grievances which bring the lines into so many women's faces and the pathos into their eyes--the grievance of having set up an idol and seen it fall. The Sydney Campion who had deceived and wronged a trusting girl was not the man that she had known and loved. That was all. It was nothing that could be told to the outer world, nothing that in itself const.i.tuted a reason for her leaving him and making him a mark for arrows of scandal and curiosity; but it simply killed outright the love that she had hitherto borne him, so that her heart lay cold and heavy in her bosom as a stone.

So frozen and hard it seemed to her, that she could not bring herself to acknowledge that certain words spoken to her husband by the stranger had had any effect on her at all. In the old days, as she said to herself, they would have hurt her terribly. "_You cruelly deserted her because you wanted to marry a rich woman._" She, Nan, was the rich woman for whom Sydney Campion had deserted another. It was cruel to have made _her_ the cause of Sydney's treachery--the instrument of his fall. She had never wished to wrong anyone, nor that anyone should be wronged for her sake. She would not, she thought, have married Sydney if she had known this story earlier. Why had he married her?--ah, there came in the sting of the sentence which she had overheard: "You wanted to marry a rich woman." Yes, she was rich. Sydney had not even paid her the very poor compliment of deserting another woman because he loved her best--he had loved her wealth and committed a base deed to gain it, that was all.

She was unjust to Sydney in this; but it was almost impossible that she should not be unjust. The remembrance of his burden of debt came back to her, of the bill that he could not meet, of the list of his liabilities which he had been so loath to give her, and she told herself that he had desired nothing but her wealth and the position that she could give him.

To attain his own ends he had made a stepping-stone of her. He was welcome to do so. She would make it easy for him to use her money, so that he need never know the humiliation of applying to her for it. Now that she understood what he wanted, she would never again make the mistake of supposing that he cared for her. But it was hard on her--hard to think that she had given the love of her youth to a man who valued her only for her gold; hard to know that the dream of happiness was over, and that the brightness of her life was gone. It was no wonder that Nan's recovery was slow, when she lay, day after day, night after night, the slow tears creeping down her cheeks, thinking such thoughts as these. The blow seemed to have broken her heart and her will to live.

It would have been a relief to her to be told that she must die.

Her weakness was probably responsible for part of the depth and darkness of her despair. She was a puzzle to her sister-in-law, who had been used to find in Nan a never-failing spring of brightness and gentle mirth.

Lady Pynsent began to see signs of something more than a physical ailment. She said one day, more seriously than usual,

"I hope, Nan, you have not quarreled with your husband."

"Oh no, no," said Nan, starting and flushing guilty; "I never quarrel with Sydney."

"I fancied there was something amiss. Take my advice, Nan, and don't stand on your dignity with your husband. A man is ready enough to console himself with somebody else if his wife isn't nice to him. I would make it up if I were you, if there has been anything wrong."

Nan kept silence.

"He is very anxious about you. Don't you think you are well enough to see him to-day?" For Sydney had not entered Nan's room since that unlucky time when she fainted at his appearance.

"Oh no, no--not to-day," said Nan. And then, collecting herself, she added, "At least--not just yet--a little later in the afternoon, I mean."

"I'll tell him to look in at four," said Lady Pynsent.