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Updated: June 22, 2025
It was, perhaps, only natural that Millicent Chyne should have noted this man as soon as he crossed the threshold. He was as remarkable as some free and dignified denizen of the forest in the midst of domestic animals. She mentally put him down for a waltz, and before five minutes had elapsed he was bowing before her while a mutual friend murmured his name.
It meant that Jack had come home with the full intention of fulfilling his engagement to Millicent Chyne. At first she had rather resented Sir John's outspoken objection to her niece as his son's wife. But during the last months she had gradually come round to his way of thinking; not, perhaps, for the first time in her life. She had watched Millicent.
Just because she was so sure of her own love she felt that she could never betray the falseness of Millicent Chyne. She felt somehow that Millicent's fall in Jack Meredith's estimation would drag down with it the whole of her sex, and consequently herself. She did not dare to betray Millicent, because the honour of her sex must be held up by an exaggerated honour in herself.
"A matter of half an hour, miss." Millicent Chyne, whose face was drawn and white, moved farther into the hall. Seeing the dining-room door ajar, she passed into that stately apartment, followed by the butler. "Mr. Oscard sent me this note," she said, showing a crumpled paper, "saying that he was leaving for Africa to-night. He gives no explanation. Why has he gone to Africa?"
For the sake of the man she loved mark that! not only the man to whom she was engaged, but whom she loved Millicent Chyne could not forbear pandering to her own vanity by the sacrifice of her own modesty and purity of thought. There was the sting for Lady Cantourne.
She was tolerant and eminently wise, this old lady who had made one huge mistake long ago; and she knew that the danger, the harm, the low vulgarity lay in the little fact that Millicent Chyne loved Jack Meredith, according to her lights.
And how weakly ready he was to grasp at the olive branch held out to him across a continent! He took the letter; he made a step with it towards the door, seeking solitude; then, as an afterthought, he looked at the superscription. It was addressed to the same person, Miss Chyne, but in a different handwriting the handwriting of a man well educated but little used to wielding the pen.
He was desperately in earnest, and that which made him a good sportsman an unmatched big-game hunter, calm and self-possessed in any strait gave him a strange deliberation now, which Millicent Chyne could not understand. "Why not?" "I do not know because you mustn't." And in her heart she wanted him to say it again.
We have learnt to associate mustard with beef, and therefore mustard shall be eaten with beef until the day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Miss Millicent Chyne became aware, as the year advanced towards the sere and yellow leaf, that in opposing her wayward will in single combat against a simple little association in the public mind she was undertaking a somewhat herculean task.
Let it, therefore, be ours to note the outward signs of a very natural emotion. Miss Chyne noted them herself with care, and not without a few deft touches to hair and dress. When Jack Meredith entered the room she was standing near the window, holding back the curtain with one hand and watching, half shyly, for his advent.
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