“He is terribly in love,” said the duchess, carelessly, and then Lady Peters decided that she would accede to Lord Arleigh’s request.

Chapter XXIII.

More than once during the week that ensued after his proposal of marriage to Madaline, Lord Arleigh looked in wonder at the duchess.  She seemed so unlike herself—­absent, brooding, almost sullen.  The smiles, the animation, the vivacity, the wit, the brilliant repartee that had distinguished her had all vanished.  More than once he asked her if she was ill; the answer was always “No.”  More than once he asked her if she was unhappy; the answer was always the same—­“No.”

“You are miserable because your husband is not here,” he said to her one day, compassionately.  “If you had known how much you would have missed him, you would not have let him go.”

There was a wondrous depth of pain in the dark eyes raised to his.

“I wish he had not gone,” she said; “from the very depths of my heart I wish that.”  Then she seemed to recover her natural gayety.  “I do not know, though, why I should have detained him,” she said, half laughingly.  “He is so fond of yachting.”

“You must not lose all your spirits before he returns, Philippa, or he will say we have been but sorry guardians.”

“No one has ever found fault with my spirits before,” said the duchess.  “You are not complimentary, Norman.”

“You give me such a strange impression,” he observed.  “Of course it is highly ridiculous, but if I did not know you as well as I do, I should think that you had something on your mind, some secret that was making you unhappy—­that there was a struggle always going on between something you would like to do and something you are unwilling to do.  It is an absurd idea, I know, yet it has taken possession of me.”

She laughed, but there was little music in the sound.

“What imaginative power you have, Norman!  You would make your fortune as a novelist.  What can I have to be unhappy about?  Should you think that any woman has a lot more brilliant than mine?  See how young I am for my position—­how entirely I have my own way!  Could any one, do you think, be more happy than I?”

“No, perhaps not,” he replied.

So the week passed, and at the end of it Lady Peters went with Madaline to St. Mildred’s.  At first the former had been unwilling to go—­it had seemed to her a terrible mesalliance, but, woman-like, she had grown interested in the love-story—­she had learned to understand the passionate love that Lord Arleigh had for his fair-haired bride.  A breath of her own youth swept over her as she watched them.

It might be a mesalliance, a bad match, but it was decidedly a case of true love, of the truest love she had ever witnessed; so that her dislike to the task before her melted away.

After all, Lord Arleigh had a perfect right to please himself—­to do as he would; if he did not think Madaline’s birth placed her greatly beneath him, no one else need suggest such a thing.  From being a violent opponent of the marriage, Lady Peters became one of its most strenuous supporters.  So they went away to St. Mildred’s, where the great tragedy of Madaline’s life was to begin.