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When one's love time comes, nothing else in the world matters; every other consideration goes phut, as it should." "Goes what?" "Goes to blazes, then, as it should." "As it should," echoed Mavis. "Dear little Mavis!" smiled Windebank, "But it's big Mavis now." He called the waiter, to give him a note with which to pay the bill. "What wicked waste!" remarked Mavis in an undertone.
For all Windebank's outward impassivity, Mavis noticed that, when he put the ring on her finger, his hand trembled so violently that he all but dropped it. Directly the wedding was over, Windebank and Mavis got into the former's motor, which was waiting outside the church. "At last!" said Windebank, as he sat beside his wife. "Where next?" asked Mavis.
Till now, she felt that her baby was part of this life and herself; then, without further ado, he would be torn from her cognisance to be put out of sight in the ground. The inexorable minutes passed. Mavis stood before the open grave. Miss Toombs, ashamed of her earlier timidity, stood beside her. Windebank, erect and bare-headed, was a little behind.
"She must be bad to have fascinated Sir Archibald as she has done," she declared. "Windebank is no fool," urged her husband. "I suppose the next thing we shall hear is that she's living under his protection," cried Mrs Devitt. "In St John's Wood," added Miss Spraggs, whose information on such matters was thirty years behind the times. "More likely he'll marry her," remarked Devitt.
Windebank murmured, adding to the girl, "This way." Mavis followed him up the hall to the table next the one where the elderly couple were sitting. "This is about our mark," he said. "Why specially here?" she asked. "Those elderly geesers are a sort of chaperone for unprotected innocence; a parson and all that," he remarked. She could hardly forbear smiling at his conception of protection.
"Don't look so astonished. It's the advice he gave to Archie Windebank." "I see: and he told you. But the pater's right over that." "How do you know?" "That's telling." Later in the afternoon, at tea, Mavis learned from Perigal much of his life since they had last met.
If Windebank had been more skilled in the mechanism of a woman's heart, he would have promptly divined the girl's gaiety had been wilfully assumed, in order to conceal from herself the anxiety that Windebank's words, with reference to the proper conduct of a true lover, had inspired.
"You might run off." He laughed. By the time they reached the shop, Mavis had quite emerged from the sobriety of her demeanour to become an approximation to her old light-hearted self. "That's how I love to see you," remarked Windebank. When they entered the shop, Mavis' face fell. "What's the matter?" he asked, all concern for his wife. "Don't you smell paraffin?" "What of it?"
Mention of the name of Devitt was the spark that set alight a raging conflagration in her being. She had lost a happy married life with Windebank, to be as she now was, entirely owing to the Devitts. Now it was all plain enough so plain that she wondered how she had not seen it before.
"What about me?" she repeated more insistently. "You know what I said to you, asked you last night." Mavis hung her head. "What did you tell Windebank in your letter?" she asked presently. "Don't talk about him." "I shall if I want to. What did you say about me?" "Shall I tell you?" he asked suddenly, as he sat beside her. "I told him how wholesome and how sweet you were. That's what I said."
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