"I think," she observed slowly, "that you may find it more difficult than you expect--to manage that. Someone's sure to find out and tell him."

"Not necessarily," he answered.

"What about the servants?" persisted Nan. "They'll hardly allow my arrival at Mallow in the early hours of the morning to pa.s.s without comment! I really think, Peter," she added with a wry smile, "that it would have been simpler all round if you'd allowed me to run away."

His eyes sought hers.

"Won't you trust me, Nan?" he said patiently. "I'm not going to take you to Mallow to-night. I'm going to take you to Sandy's mother."

"To the mater!"

Sandy fairly gasped with astonishment.

Eliza, narrow-minded and pre-eminently puritanical in her views, was the very last person in the world whose help he would have thought of requisitioning in the present circ.u.mstances.

Peter nodded.

"Yes. I've only met her two or three times, but I'm quite sure she is the right person. I believe," he added, smiling gently, "that I know your mother better than you do, Sandy."

And it would appear that this was really the case. For when, in the small hours of the morning, the trio reached Trevarthen Wood and Sandy had effected an entry and aroused his mother, there followed a brief interview between Peter and Mrs. McBain, from which the latter emerged with her grim mouth all tremulous at the corners and her keen eyes shining through a mist of tears.

Sandy and Nan were waiting together in the hall, and both looked up anxiously as she bore down upon them.

To the ordinary eye she may have appeared merely a very plain old woman, arrayed in a hideous dressing-gown of uncompromising red flannel. But to Nan, as the bony arms went round her and the Scottish voice, harsh no longer but tender as an old song, murmured in her ears, she seemed the embodiment of beautiful, consoling motherhood, and her flat chest a resting-place where weary heads might gladly lie and sorrowful hearts pour out their grief in tears.

"Dinna greet, ma bairnie," crooned Eliza. "Ma wee bairnie, greet nae mair."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

THE WHITE FLAME

It was not till late in the afternoon of the day following upon her flight from Mallow that Nan and Peter met again. He had, so Sandy informed her, walked over to the Court in order to see Kitty.

"I think he has some private affair of his own that he wants to talk over with her," explained Sandy.

"It's about his wife, I expect," answered Nan dully. "She's had sunstroke--and is ordered home from India."

"Poor devil!" The words rushed from Sandy's lips. "How rotten everything is!" he added fiercely, with youth's instinctive revolt against the inevitableness of life's pains and penalties.

"And I've hardly mended matters, have I?" she submitted rather bitterly.

He slipped a friendly arm round her neck.

"Don't you worry any," he said, with gruff sympathy. "Mallory's fixed up everything--and it all dovetails in neatly with Kitty's saying you were staying with friends for the night. You're staying _here_--do you see? And Mallory and the mater between 'em have settled that you're to prolong your visit for a couple of days--to give more colour to the proceedings, so to speak! You'll emerge without a stain on your character!" he went on, trying with boyish clumsiness to cheer her up.

"Oh, don't, Sandy!" Her lip quivered. "I--I don't think I mind much about that. I feel as if I'd stained my soul."

"Well, if there were no blacker souls around than yours, old thing, the world would be a darned sight nicer place to live in! And that's that."

Nan contrived a smile.

"Sandy, you're rather a dear!" she said gratefully.

And then Peter came in, and Sandy hastened to make himself scarce.

A dead silence followed his hurried exit. Nan found herself trembling, and for a moment she dared not lift her eyes to Peter's face for fear of what she might read there. At last:

"Peter," she said, without looking at him. "Are you still--angry with me?"

"What makes you think I am angry?"

She looked up at that, then shrank back from the bitter hardness in his face almost as though he had dealt her a blow.

"Oh, you are--you are!" she cried tremulously.

"Don't you think most men would be in the same circ.u.mstances?"

"I don't understand," she said very low.

"No? I suppose you wouldn't," he replied. "You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word--faithfulness. Perhaps you can't help it--you're half a Varincourt! . . . Don't you realise what you've done? You've torn down our love and soiled it--made it nothing! I believed in you as I believed in G.o.d. . . . And then you run away with Maryon Rooke! One man or another--apparently it's all the same to you."

She rose and drew rather timidly towards him.

"Has it--hurt you--like that?" she said whisperingly. "You didn't mind--about Roger. Not in the same way."

"_Mind_?"

The word came hoa.r.s.ely, and his hands, hanging loosely at his sides, slowly clenched. All the anguish of thwarting, the torture of a man who knows that the woman he loves will be another man's wife, found utterance in that one short word. Nan shivered at the stark agony in his tone. She did not attempt to answer him. There was nothing she could say. She could only stand voiceless and endure the pain-racked silence which followed.

It seemed to her that an infinity of time dragged by before he spoke again. When he did, it was in quiet, level tones out of which every atom of emotion had been crushed.

"You were pledged to Trenby," he said slowly. "That was different. I couldn't ask you to break your pledge to him, even had I been free to do so. You were his, not mine. . . . But you had given no promise to Maryon Rooke."

The incalculable reproach and accusation of those last words seemed to burn their way right into her heart. In a flash of revelation the whole thing became clear to her. She saw how bitterly she had failed the man she loved in that mad moment when she had thrown up everything and gone away with Maryon.

Dimly she acquiesced in the fact that there were excuses to be made--the long strain of the preceding months, her illness, leaving her with weakened nerves, and, finally, Roger's outrageous behaviour in the studio that day. But of these she would not speak to Peter. Had he not saved her from herself she would have wrecked her whole life by now, and she felt that, to him, she could not make excuses--however valid they might be.

She had failed him utterly--failed in that faithfulness of the spirit without which love is no more than a s.e.x instinct. She knew it must appear like this to him, although deep within herself she was conscious that it was not really so. In her heart there was a white flame that would burn only for Peter--an altar flame which nothing could touch or defile. And the men who loved her knew it. It was this, the knowledge that the inmost soul and spirit of her eluded him, which had kept Roger's jealous anger at such a dangerous pitch.

"There is only one thing." Peter was speaking again, still in the same curiously detached tones as before. It was almost as though he were discussing the affairs of someone else--affairs which did not concern him very vitally. "There's only one more thing to be said. You've made it easier for me to do--what I have to do."

"What you have to do?" she repeated.

"Yes. I've had a cable from India. My wife is no better, and I'm going out to bring her home."

"I'm sorry she's no better," said Nan mechanically.