Such thoughts, with others, flashed through my mind as I sat there facing her. She was leaning back, her hands fallen idly upon her lap, peering straight at me through that spotted veil which, half-concealing her wondrous beauty, imparted to her an additional air of mystery.
"You have quarrelled with Sir Bernard, I presume?" I hazarded.
"Quarrelled!" she echoed. "We were never friends."
Truly she possessed all a clever woman's presence of mind in the evasion of a leading question.
"An acquaintance--yes. But I have always distrusted him."
"Mary likes him, I believe," I remarked. "He was poor Courtenay's most intimate friend for many years."
"She judges him from that standpoint alone. Any of her husband's friends were hers, and she was fully cognisant of Sir Bernard's unceasing attention to the sufferer."
"If that is so it is rather a pity that she was recently so neglectful," I said.
"I know, Ralph--I know the reason of it all," she faltered. "I can't explain to you, because it is not just that I should expose my sister's secret. But I know the truth which, when revealed, will make it clear to the world that her apparent neglect was not culpable. She had a motive."
"A motive in going to town of an evening and enjoying herself!" I exclaimed. "Of course, the motive was to obtain relaxation. When a man is more than twice the age of his wife, the latter is apt to chafe beneath the golden fetter. It's the same everywhere--in Mayfair as in Mile End; in Suburbia as in a rural village. Difference of age is difference of temperament; and difference of temperament opens a breach which only a lover can fill."
She was silent--her eyes cast down. She saw that the attempt to vindicate her sister had, as before, utterly and ignominiously failed.
"Yes, Ralph, you are right," she admitted at last. "Judged from a philosophic standpoint a wife ought not to be more than ten years her husband's junior. Love which arises out of mere weakness is as easily fixed upon one object as another; and consequently is at all times transferable. It is so pleasant to us women to be admired, and so soothing to be loved that the grand trial of constancy to a young woman married to an elderly man is not to add one more conquest to her triumphs, but to earn the respect and esteem of the man who is her husband. And it is difficult. Of that I am convinced."