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It contained a portrait of Sydney's face, evidently cut from a photograph by the girl herself. A flood of light entered Lettice's mind; but she took her discovery with outward calmness. No thought of accusing or upbraiding Milly ever occurred to her. Why should it? she would have said. It was not Milly who had been to blame, if the girl's own story were true.
He was afraid of what it intimated, threatened, for himself, and of its unsupportable mockery. He felt as an animal might feel cornered by a hugely grim and playful cruelty. The westering sun fell through a window on the disordered huddle of Lettice's hastily discarded clothes streaming from a chair to the floor her stockings, her chemise threaded with a narrow blue ribband.
"No; they are refused before you ask them. The law is in motion nothing shall prevent me from getting my divorce." "That you may marry this woman!" she blazed forth, jumping from her seat, with Lettice's book in her hand. It had been lying before her, and the name had caught her eye. "You shall never marry her I swear it by my father's grave. You shall never divorce me!"
He turned round aghast, but was reassured when he saw that it was none other than Lettice's lover who stood by his side. "Hush, Will," he said, "call me Hubert still; it were dangerous for my name to be overheard. But thou hast news for me, I can read it in thy face."
"The whole County knows," she returned in the egotism of youthful misery. Her voice, too, was like Lettice's sweet with the premonition of the querulous note that, Rutherford Berry had once said, distinguished all good women. A sudden intuition directed his gaze upon the Courthouse lawn. "They're selling you out," he hazarded, "for debt." She nodded, with trembling lips.
This was not Lettice's way of looking at it. The hero of her story was an urn in the hands of a divine artist, and a sterner stress was necessary for the consummate work. But he, Alan, was no hero. Horace' verse was nearer the mark with him. Amphoræ coepit Institui; currente rota cur urceus exit? As water to wine were all the uses of his life henceforth, compared with that which might have been.
"You look thin and fagged." "Oh, Sydney, if you could but see yourself!" He smiled at this, and then rose to go. "But you will stay and have tea with me? Do, Sydney if only," and Lettice's voice grew low and deep, "if only in token that there is peace between us."
"I am sure I don't know why; I never felt more worldly in my life," said Lettice, laughing. "Am I not fit for Mrs. Hartley's drawing-room?" "Fit? You are lovely; but not quite like anybody else. That is the best of it; Mrs. Hartley will rave of you," said Clara, as they set forth. And the words jarred a little on Lettice's sensitive mind; she thought that she should object to be raved about.
"Damnation!" he cried, crushing the paper in his hand. Laramore started up with a roar of "My ship!" and then broke into a torrent of oaths. Mistress Lettice's screams filled the room until her brother roughly silenced her by clapping his hand over her mouth. "By the Lord Harry, Lettice, I will throw you out to them if you do not hush! Gentlemen, in God's name, what are we to do?"
As Cora sauntered along the pavement, turning her head restlessly from side to side, her attention was caught by a young woman carrying a child, who went in at Lettice's door. Mrs. Walcott stopped short, and put her finger to her forehead with a bewildered air. "Now where have I seen that face?" she muttered to herself.
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