The Incomplete Amorist

"In that case," said Miss Desmond, "I should say you were the very wife for him."

"She isn't," said Lady St. Craye sitting up. "I feel like a silly school-girl talking to you like this. I think I'll go now. I'm not really so silly as I seem. I've been ill--influenza, you know--and I got so frightfully tired. And I don't think I'm so strong as I used to be. I've always thought I was strong enough to play any part I wanted to play. But--you've been very kind. I'll go--" She lay back.

"Don't be silly," said Miss Desmond briskly. "You are a school-girl compared with me, you know. I suppose you've been trying to play the rôle of the designing heroine--to part true lovers and so on, and then you found you couldn't."

"They're not true lovers," said Lady St. Craye eagerly; "that's just it. She'd never make him happy. She's too young and too innocent. And when she found out what a man like him is like, she'd break her heart. And he told me he'd be happier with me than he ever had been with her."

"Was that true, or--?"

"Oh, yes, it was true enough, though he said it. You've met him--he told me. But you don't know him."

"I know his kind though," said Miss Desmond. "And so you love him very much indeed, and you don't care for anything else,--and you think you understand him,--and you could forgive him everything? Then you may get him yet, if you care so very much--that is, if Betty doesn't."

"She doesn't. She thinks she does, but she doesn't. If only he hadn't written to her--"

"My dear," said Miss Desmond, "I was a fool myself once, about a man with eyes his colour. You can't tell me anything that I don't know. Does he know how much you care?"

"Yes."

"Ah, that's a pity--still--Well, is there anything else you want to tell me?"

"I don't want to tell anyone anything. Only--when she said she'd go away, I advised her where to go--and I told her of a quiet place--and Mr. Temple's there. He's the other man who admires her."

"I see. How Machiavelian of you!"--Miss Desmond touched the younger woman's hand with brusque gentleness--"And--?"

"And I didn't quite tell her the truth about Mr. Vernon and me," said Lady St. Craye, wallowing in the abject joys of the confessional. "And I am a beast and not fit to live. But," she added with the true penitent's instinct of self-defence, "I know it's only--oh, I don't know what--not love, with her. And it's my life."