He coughed his way apologetically back into the twilight at the farther end of the room.
“There scarcely seems time for sentiment exactly!” Tony laughed to himself at the absurdity of it and stepped out into the garden. He didn’t want to see the family just at present. They would grate and jar. He could be alone; later, he would talk to Maradick.
And Lady Gale, for the first time in her life, avoided him. She did not feel that she could talk to him just yet; she must wait until she had thought out the new developments and decided on a course of action. The day had filled her with alarm, because suddenly two things had been shown to her. The first, that there was no one in the world for whom she really cared save Tony. There were other people whom she liked, friends, acquaintances; for her own husband and Rupert she had a protecting kindliness that was bound up intimately in her feeling for the family, but love!—no—it was Tony’s alone.
She had never realised before how deeply, how horribly she cared. It was something almost wild and savage in her, so that she, an old lady with white hair and a benevolent manner, would have fought and killed and torn his enemies were he in danger. The wildness, the ferocity of it frightened her so that she sat there in the dark with trembling hands, watching the lights of the ships at sea and, blindly, blindly praying.
She had known, of course, before, that he was everything to her, that without him life would lose all its purpose and meaning and beauty, but there had been other things that counted as well; now it seemed that nothing else mattered in the least.
And the second thing that she saw, and it was this second revelation that had shown her the first, was that she was in danger of losing him. The relationship of perfect confidence that had, she fondly imagined, existed until now between them, had never been endangered, because there had been nothing to hide. He had not told her everything, of course; there must have been things at Oxford, and even before, that he had not told her, but she had felt no alarm because they had been, she was sure, things that did not matter. And then he had, so often, come and told her, told her with his charming smile and those open eyes of his, so that there could be no question of his keeping anything back.