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"I brought Lady Brigit here because I wanted to talk to her," explained Joyselle, mildly. Carron laughed. "So do I want to talk to her!" Brigit gave a nervous laugh. "Let's all go downstairs and talk there. My conversation isn't usually so appreciated."
She would fuss and cry and tell all her friends how ungrateful her children were, but in the end Tommy's firmness would prevail. She laughed as she got out of the carriage at the Newlyns. By great good luck Joyselle was dining there, and Théo coming only to the dance. "I will tell him," she thought, and her heart gave a great throb and then sank warmly into its place at the thought of seeing him.
Joyselle had not joined his wife and son, but stood opposite them, in front of a group of relations from the country, his fine figure in its perfect clothes contrasting strongly with them. He was paler than Brigit had ever seen him, and his eyes, bent to the ground for the most part, even more deeply circled than they had been at the café a few hours before.
Had Brigit ever done anything to please her mother? Never. One of the two women-guests sat down at the piano and began to play, very softly, an old song of Tosti's. Everybody listened. A hansom jingled by and a bicycle's sharp bell was a loud noise in the after-dinner silence. Joyselle was standing by a table, absently balancing on his forefinger a long, broad, ivory paper-knife.
It was a miserable end to her childish dream of felicity, for she was brave enough to admit to herself without the least hesitation what it was that had happened. And when Joyselle at length stopped playing and came back to sit by her, she smiled at him in very good imitation of her own smile of half an hour before. But he was not satisfied. "You did not like it?" he asked simply.
These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent, ungenial guest. The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came.
Then she had her maid lock her dressing-room door, and give her an hour's facial massage. At seven Joyselle arrived, and she was told that he had arrived. "Ask Mr. Joyselle to come to my boudoir, Burton." "Very good, my lady." When Joyselle was ushered in he found a beautiful person in a lacy white tea-gown reading Maeterlinck on a satin chaise-longue. He kissed her hand.
"Voyons l'amoureux," he cried, "show me thy face of a lover, little boy, who only yesterday wore aprons and climbed on my knees to search for sweets in my pockets!" Madame Joyselle turned quietly, after having, with a dexterous twist of her frying-pan, flopped her omelet to its other side. "Victor! And what brings you back, my man?"
He would, she knew, give her up without a word if she asked him to; and she had also learned to know that whatever Joyselle might have done in like case a few months before, he would not refuse to see her now if she told him that she and Théo had agreed to separate. Here was freedom to go her own way, unrebuked by her own conscience or the conscience of the man she loved.
She was as yet quite unused to the dominion of her own emotions, and they, being so much stronger than her self-control, had carried her away with them. It had been a kind of mental fakirism, and as fakirs smile as they burn and cut themselves, so she had been able to smile as she burnt and cut at her own heart in Joyselle. Yet she was not an altogether cruel woman.
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