was by no means serene, that the
portrait by Rennes somehow made no progress, that Reckage was feverish
and excitable. His bearing toward Sara during the lunch confirmed
Pensee's suspicion that the love which had existed between them as boy
and girl was still unextinguished on either side. He would have been
less than mortal, she thought, if he had not felt, with all the
bitterness of a conscious fool, that he had missed his true destiny.
Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements
his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate,
invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of
strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its
effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be
supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensee that Sara had behaved very
naturally, very touchingly, through the trying conversation on the
subject of rising men and their marriages. Her demeanour had been
unsurpassable. But it was not in nature that a woman who understood a
man could look on, inactive and indifferent, while he fettered himself
with some damaging influence. Perhaps her ladyship felt the situation
the more keenly, because, much as she loved Mrs. Parflete, she could not
bring herself to think that she was the wife for Robert. She had spent
many weeks refusing admittance to this thought, yet prudence was
prudence, and, by virtue of its stability, it prevailed. The union, even
viewed in the most favourable light, had always seemed imprudent. It was
too hurried. Shocking, mortifying as the possibility of its being
illegal was, Pensee's conviction that Almighty God ordered all things
for the best seemed less a faith and more a matter of pure reason than
was usual in the ordinary run of hard cases which made demands upon her
piety. "Two diamonds do not easily form cup and socket," was an old
saying in her home circle. The more she had seen of Brigit Parflete the
more she had been struck with her--struck with her moodiness, struck
with her contempt for received opinions, her vigour and independence of
will. Was she the wife to further the advance of a man of extraordinary
ability, already much handicapped on the world's course by a proud
spirit, a reckless, impetuous disdain of creatures generally considered
the pink of human excellence? He was passionately in love, and the
strength of this sentiment carried, for the time, every thought of hi