beginning to forget, or as if you had not forgiven my anger at your desertion. Ah, Bothwell, you should have pitied me and sympathised with me in that cruel parting. You ought to have known that my anger was despair. But you thought only of your own dignity, your own self-respect—not of my sorrow. Men are so selfish."
Bothwell did not go to London. He excused himself upon various grounds, and remained quietly at Penmorval. But from that hour his manner to Hilda changed altogether. From an unavowed lover he became an indifferent acquaintance. He set a watch upon his tongue that it should say no words of pleasantness. He vowed that he would not again suffer himself to be enmeshed in Lady Valeria's net: but until he had calmly and deliberately broken with her he could not be the lover of any other woman. He made up his mind that so soon as the General and his wife were settled at Fox Hill there should be a rupture—temperate, gentle, firm, and irrevocable.
Lady Valeria came to Fox Hill, and summoned her slave. He went, and there was no rupture—only a renewal of the old bonds. The bird was in the fowler's net again. Bothwell was often at Fox Hill. He spent long afternoons there tête-à-tête with Lady Valeria. She was less careful than she had been in India.
"We are not surrounded with busybodies here," she said. "I feel that I can do as I like in my own house."
He went to London to borrow money for her when she was in difficulties about that horrible book of hers: and Lady Valeria's normal state now was financial difficulty. Almost everybody knew that she was a gambler, except her husband. He was so thoroughly respected and beloved that no one had the heart to make him unhappy by breathing a word to his wife's discredit. He thought her faultless.
She had hardened in that false wicked life of hers: but she was more fascinating than ever, Bothwell thought, albeit he was far less under her spell than he had been in the old days at Simla. The very fever of her mind intensified her charm. She seemed such an ethereal creature—all life, and light, and sparkle. She was, to other women, as the electric light is to gas.
And now, half buried in his corner of the railway-carriage, Bothwell smoked the pipe of meditation. He looked back upon that fatal past, and cursed himself for the weak folly that had put such a chain round his neck. He looked back, and recalled the old scenes, the old feelings, and he almost wondered if he could be the same man who had so felt and so acted.
He drove to Fox Hill as fast as a cab-horse would take him, alighted a little way from the chief gates, and dismissed his conveyance, meaning to walk back to Plymouth after his interview. Fox Hill was four miles from the station, but Bothwell
