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Updated: June 6, 2025
"By the way," said Lady Garnett, when the girls had vanished into the building, "of course you know that Philip Rainham's friend the young man who paints and has a moustache, I mean is here, or will be very shortly? He was staying at our hotel at Berne." "Mr. Lightmark, I suppose?" answered the other, without showing her surprise except in her eyes.
And yet on the morrow he found himself, and not without a certain relief, sitting beside the mundane, little lady, and turning to her incessant ripple of speech something of the philosophic indifference to which her husband had attained, while a sturdy pair of gaily-caparisoned horses, whose bells made a constant accompaniment, not unpleasing in its preciseness, to the vagueness of Rainham's thought, hurried them over the dusty surface of the Cornice.
Brilliana faltered her answer. " unless he believes you stand higher in the graces of a certain lady than he can ever hope to stand." Master Rainham's smile gave Halfman the feel of goose-flesh. Brilliana's face was, happily, averted. "Madam, assure me 'tis so," grunted boar's-head.
The humour which had shone in Rainham's eyes while they had been talking seemed to have gone out suddenly, like a lamp, leaving them blank and tired. It shocked her to realize how old and ill he had become. Indolence and ill-health, in the opinion of many the salient points in Philip Rainham's character, had left him at forty with little of the social habit.
Rainham's death had affected some of them for a few days perhaps, but it had not the shock of the unexpected; they chiefly wondered that he had dragged his life through so cruel a winter.
On the afternoon of the day after Rainham's return to the dock, Lightmark was caressing his fair moustache upon the doorstep of the Sylvesters' house, No. 137, Park Street, West, a mansion of unpretending size, glorious in its summer coat of white paint, relieved only by the turquoise-blue tiles which surrounded the window-boxes, and the darker blue of the railings and front-door.
What hurt her, with a dull pain which she could not analyse, was the sudden tarnishing of a scarcely-admitted ideal by Rainham's deliberate confession, making life appear for the moment intolerably sordid and mean. Would she have owned to herself that, with an almost unconscious instinct, she had judged these two men all along by a different standard?
"Oh," said Eve, in reply to one of Rainham's remarks, "is that Bordighera? What lovely blue water! and what perfectly delicious little fishing-boats! I should like to go there. Charles is going to take us to Lucerne in a week or two, you know, when the Long Vacation begins. But I suppose we shall hardly get to Italy." "Yes, that's Bordighera" with a sigh "my happy hunting-ground.
And so now his confidence was only shaken for a moment, and he was able to reply gaily to Rainham's last thrust: "My dear fellow, I expect I talked a good deal of trash last year, after all" a statement which the other did not find it worth while to deny. They had resumed their places at the table, and Lightmark, with a half-sheet of note-paper before him, was dashing off profiles.
Concerning the truth of Rainham's story she could not fail to harbour doubts; that her husband was concealing something was daily more plainly revealed to her. It was hard that she should suffer, but what could she do?
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