"Oh, that's all right, old chap," Bulstrode a.s.sured cheerfully.

"My dear d.u.c.h.ess, it seems an unconscionable waste of time and life for any one to ignore the inevitable! It's such a prodigal throwing out of the window of riches!"

Bulstrode took her hands, both of them, in his as she stood in the winter sunshine, the open house door behind her, the terrace and its broken stairs of crumbling stone before her.

"Why, my dear lady, if I kept a diary of daily events I couldn't write down one page of good reasons why you should be living here and Westboro' up there, and I a comic go-between, in the secret of both and the confidence of one."

"Oh," she interrupted, "then you're in the confidence...?"

"Of your husband, yes," Bulstrode found himself startled into betrayal.

She drew her hands from him and walked on a little in the sunshine, and he followed by her side.

"I don't mind," she permitted, "you're such a perfect dear. I shouldn't mind at all if I thought that the confidence were a good one."

Her tone was light and cool, but the gentleman never failed to notice when the d.u.c.h.ess spoke of the Duke that there was a tremor under her words, a warmth, an agitation, which she vainly tried to control.

"Confidences," she said, "are very rarely just, you know, and _les absents ont toujours tort_."

"Oh, you don't mean...?" Jimmy emphasized.

"It was a confidence, wasn't it?"

"A real one," she was a.s.sured.

"Well then, you'll keep it, of course."

She drew the stole up round her long fair neck; her delicate head came out of the soft fur like a flower. But before she could follow up her words Bulstrode said:

"You, of course, then know how he loves you."

He felt more than knew that she trembled, and he saw an instinctive gesture which he understood meant that he should be silent.

"You and I put it quite clearly, Mr. Bulstrode, the other day." Her voice was serene again. "If only one cares enough--that's the necessary thing for every question."

"Well?"

She half shrugged, made a little motion with her white hands, and this answer said for her: "That is indeed the question, and I haven't solved it."

They stopped at the terraced walk. The low stones, dark and black, were filled in their interstices with fine lines of greenish moss. On the sunny corner the dial's shadow fell across the noon. The d.u.c.h.ess put her hand on the warmed stones.

"It's a heavenly day," she said, "I don't believe that the Riviera is warmer. I never have seen such an English December."

Her eyes, which had been fixed on the woods below the garden, now turned towards the house and rested on one of the upper windows where the sun fell on the little panes. The d.u.c.h.ess remained looking up a few seconds, then she came back to her guest.

"I started, you know, to tell you something," Bulstrode smiled at her.

"I once served on a jury in the West, and although the case was a miserably sad one in every way, I suppose, I couldn't take it as seriously as I should have done, for from the first the whole thing seemed so unnecessary, and the crisis could so easily have been avoided."

"I know," she interrupted him, "but you're rather wrong. Not from the first."

He capitulated. "Well, grant it so if you like, only agree with me when I say from my own--" he put his hand down on the dial's edge.

"From this lovely noon-time on, every hour you waste is clear loss.

The Duke loves you as women are rarely loved, and after all," he said with something like pa.s.sion in his agreeable voice "what _do_ you all expect? Love doesn't hang on every tree for a woman to pluck at will, and you have the great luck, my dear d.u.c.h.ess, to be loved by your own husband. Why don't you go to him?"

"Go to him?" she echoed.

He curtly replied: "Why not?"

"My dear friend!"

"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"

"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman, would disobey her?"

"Westboro' would not."

The d.u.c.h.ess said coldly: "Pride is not love."

"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"

"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."

"And now?"

She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I don't quite know."

And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?"

"Partly."

Her companion's face grew stern. The d.u.c.h.ess did not see it for her eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on: "You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart, d.u.c.h.ess, terribly unstable."

The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression.

"Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?"

"Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless, wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that--utterly unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But,"

he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man, d.u.c.h.ess, only one."

"Well?" she encouraged him.

"A woman's heart," he said deeply, "a woman's true tenderness; and it needs all that heart, all its love, all its patience and sacrifice to keep that man--all and forever."

He saw her bosom heave; she had thrown her fur off, as if its warmth stifled her. Vivid color had come into her face. Her pallor for the time was destroyed, and as she flashed a rebellious look at him, a look of revolt and selfhood, he seemed to see again the American girl--wilful, egotistical, spoiled--an imperious creature whose caprices had been opposed to the Duke's Anglo-Saxon temperament and national egoism.

At this moment, the window the d.u.c.h.ess looked towards opened part way: it was under the eaves and there must have been a dovecote near, for there came the soft sound of cooing like the call of a young bird.

Possibly the gentle note reached the woman's hearing as well, for her face transcendently softened.