"You should have married an American husband," he said to her, "a man who would have idolized you, not cared whether you developed or not. A d.u.c.h.ess isn't far enough up. An American empress is higher."

The lady listening to him, shuddered a little.

"As it is," he went on regretfully, "you've been forced to develop, whether or not you wanted to, to grow finer and freer, to go farther on, to become more delightful. Here you are progressed and civilized, after years of education, experience and suffering, and, my poor child, here you are all alone."

She cried out, "Oh, Mr. Bulstrode," with a little gasp.

"Oh, no, no," he softly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "it is not fair! You're terribly wasted, and you've been, as you too well know, terribly betrayed."

But here he felt her hand on his arm with a strong grasp. She shook the arm a little.

"Don't go on," she said deeply. "I tell you not to go on." After a few seconds, in which he heard the fire and the slow bubbling of the gently boiling water and the cooing of the doves without, under the eaves, the d.u.c.h.ess said: "Listen to me. I haven't talked at all to you, let me say something now."

Her companion reflected to himself: "Well, at all events, she's not going to malign the Duke; that's a foregone conclusion."

The d.u.c.h.ess clasped her hands round her knee and raised her face to him.

"Do you think," she asked, "that there's any egoist as nasty as a feminine one? Men are admitted to be generally selfish, but we specialize, and each one of us has the faculty of getting up some new and peculiar brand, I begin to believe. At any rate, when I married, I was an egoist, and I've stayed on being one until a very little time ago. I suppose I must in a way have more or less ornamented my position, as the papers say. I did have two children as well, and in that way fulfilled my duty as a Westboro'. But really and truly, I have never in the least been a wife, and very little of a mother. I was as silly and vain as could be, and I never for a moment valued my husband. I wasn't indifferent to my children, but I was absorbed by my worldly life, and when my little boys were taken ill and died, I was on a dahabeah on the Nile, and I don't think that Cecil ever forgave us for being so far away."

She remained quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands, and when she lifted her face Bulstrode saw that she had wept.

"That," she went on, "broke the ice round my heart, when I came home to those empty rooms."

He said soothingly, "There, there, my child."

"Oh, let me go on," she urged him, "let me speak. I shall probably never feel like doing so again. But at that time when I turned to find my husband, I discovered that I had no power over him, and I realized that for years I had not possessed his love. I suppose you'll tell me that it is unusual for a woman to see so clearly as this. Perhaps it is. At any rate, just because I did so clearly, I forgave him when he came to me last year, at Cannes."

"You were wonderful!" he repeated again, "perfectly n.o.ble, and, as I said before, Westboro' did not deserve you."

She did not here, as she had done before, catch him up; on the contrary, after a few moments, she asked him point-blank:

"What then do you advise us, knowing us both, to do?"

He was distinctly disappointed that she should have put the question to him, and gave her time to withdraw it as he asked tentatively: "You really feel that you must ask me, d.u.c.h.ess?"

"Tell me, at all events."

"You are quite sure that you could not go back to your husband?"

After a little pause, she lingeringly said:

"Yes, quite sure. You must know that he will not be the first to break the ice now." Then she pushed: "You would advise my filing my papers for divorce?"

Held in this way pitilessly for a direct challenge, he met her eyes with his own, asking her gently:

"Is there nothing that speaks for Westboro' more distinctly than anything I can say? And more appealingly than anything which you in all your pride feel?"

The d.u.c.h.ess a.s.sented that there was, with a movement of her lips; she put her hands over her face and so sat quietly for a few moments, and when she spoke again to her visitor, her words were irrelevant. When some few moments after she bade him good-by, she regretted his absence in London and begged him to come and see her as soon as he returned.

"Come," she said, "at least to see whether I am here or whether I have pitched my tent and gone away."

As Bulstrode stood in the doorway she asked him: "I understand there are a lot of people at the castle for Christmas, and among them will be Mrs. Falconer? Isn't it so? Is she really so very lovely?"

"It's a different type of loveliness from yours," Bulstrode returned.

And the d.u.c.h.ess supposed: "A happier type?"

"Well, she's rather happy I think, take it all together," Jimmy said.

"Has she children?"

"None."

"Is she in love with her husband?"

And he was so long searching for a reply that the d.u.c.h.ess laughed quietly.

"Poor man," she said, "don't bother. But then since she's so happy, she must be in love with somebody else's husband."

But he put her right immediately.

"I don't think she in the least is. And why," he went on, "since happiness is so greatly the question of other people's state of mind, might we not let it go at the fact that she is herself very much loved?"

The d.u.c.h.ess looked at her guest rather absently. She was thinking of the happy beauty, the woman of a different type from her own, whose presence at Westboro' had been sought by her husband for the second time.

"Oh," she answered rather absently, giving Jimmy her hand, "she wouldn't, you know, be happy if the feeling were all on the other side."

When the Duke had casually asked his guest's plans for Christmas week, Bulstrode had come near to offending his host by declaring that he could not possibly be one of a second house party.

"Do you, then," Westboro' had asked, "_hate_ the holidays?"

The genial Bulstrode had a.s.sured him to the contrary.

"Nor do I," continued the Duke, "even though I'm a miserable man on the verge of a divorce. I expect there's too long a line of jolly Christmases back of the Westboro's for me to mope through the season.

But I don't want to have Christmas coming to an empty house, my dear fellow"--He put it pathetically, "there's no one in this gloomy place but yourself and myself. We must have a Christmas party. The tenants will, of course, be noisy and cheerful, but I'm going to ask a lot of people down and make the list out now."

And Bulstrode had, however, firmly insisted that he could not really stop on--that he must go away. "There are," he wound up his arguments, "a thousand reasons why I should go."

But Westboro' had comprehendingly suggested that they might together bring "every reason" down to the country. "And," continued his Grace, "we'll narrow things into the most intimate circle possible. For I shall ask the Ravensworths of Surrey and their children, there are eight of them, ripping little things; they used to play with my boys.

We'll turn them loose and have a tree, old man."

Jimmy watched his face with a keen pity, for there had not been one ray of light in it as he planned for his celebration.

"But you arrange to come back for Christmas Eve. There _must_ be some one in charge--I mean to say, some one so that if the whole thing is too much for me, why I'll bolt and you'll have to stand by."

He was, as he spoke, writing the names on a sheet of paper. Bulstrode felt the plan to be rather _triste_ and lifeless, and he knew that he could not and would not keep the d.u.c.h.ess' secret much longer, let its revelation cost him what it would.

"Westboro'," he said, "I shall have to be getting off to-morrow. You know I would stand by you if I could possibly see my way clear."