Yet from time to time her warm woman’s nature drooped earthward and sought for Hugh. But she shrank tremblingly from meeting him, wrote him a second vague postponement. Then regretted it an hour after. She must see him, and that soon; before he encountered Gerard. What would happen if the two men met--Gerard mad with jealous passion, Hugh blazing with indignation? The gentler elements within her took fright. A month before she would have scouted the idea of violence as preposterous. Bloodshed in private quarrel was a thing, in England, of the evil and romantic past. But she would have counted as equally unreal the story of the recent sensational incidents in their lives. Now nothing seemed too improbable for possibility. Calais sands stretched wet and bloodstained before her imagination. But still she shrank from meeting Hugh.
She lay awake long that night, in the primly furnished room where once she had dreamed so many girlish dreams of the man she was about to marry, and strove to disentangle the complexities of her emotions. She dreaded Hugh learning Gerard’s resolution. A cowardly impulse to send Hugh as mediator between Gerard and herself, was strangled at birth by a fierce grip of pride. If she alone could not convince her husband of her fidelity, what mattered his conviction at all? And then the realisation of that of which she stood self-accused lapped her woman’s chastity in fire from head to foot. At last she slept. The morning came, but with it no letter of repentance, as she had vaguely hoped, from Gerard. His decision had been final. In the afternoon she went to Sunnington and superintended the packing of her belongings. The maid Jane aided her, glancing every now and then with scared eyes at the set face of her mistress and dimly comprehending the anguish that lay behind. If Irene had gone through the rooms tearful and sobbing, the girl would have wept in sympathy; but there was that in Irene’s manner that held her silent.
Only once did Irene break down, and then she was alone in the upstairs room, that had been a nursery, and whose high fire-guards--fixtures which they had not disturbed when they took over the house--still suggested its former use. And a small child’s bed was there, occupied in her time by many little waifs. The associations the room had always evoked came back to her. She threw herself face downward on the bed.