That was all she could say on the subject then, and she could only just ask Mr. Murray if he could see her again any time the next morning.  After answering that question the lawyer went silently away.

Rose stood by the table where he had sat a moment before, looking long and steadfastly at the photograph.  She looked at the open face, she looked at the military bearing, she looked at the Victoria Cross,—­it had been the amazing courage shown in that story that had really won her,—­she looked, too, at the many medals.  She had been with him once in a moment of peril in a fire and had seen the unconscious pride with which he always answered to the call of danger.  She had, too, seen him bear acute pain as if that had been his talent, the thing he knew how to do.

“Ah, poor David!” she said softly.  “What did she do to frighten you?  Poor, poor David, you were always a coward!”

CHAPTER II

IN THE EVENING

But this was a trial to search out every part of Rose’s nature.  She had too much faith for sickness, death, or even terrible physical pain, to be to her in any sense a poisoned wound.  There are women like Rose whose inner life can only be in peril from the pain and shame of the sin of others.  To them it is an intolerable agony to be troubled in their faith in man.

Lady Charlton, swept out of the calm belonging to years of gentle actions and ideal thoughts into a storm of indignation and horror, might have lost all dignity and discretion if she had not been checked by reverence for the dumb anguish and misery of her favourite daughter.  She had some notion of the thoughts that must pass in Rose’s mind, now dull and heavy, now alert and inflicting sudden deep incisions into the quivering soul.  Marriage had been to them both very sacred.  They hated, beyond most good women, anything that seemed to materialise or lower the ideal.  If there can be imagined a scale of standards for the relations of men and women, of which Zola had not touched the extremity at one end, the first place at the other extremity might be assigned to such Englishwomen as Rose and her mother.  The most subtle and amazingly high motives had been assigned to Lord Charlton’s most ordinary actions, and happily he had been so ordinary a person that no impossible shock had been given to the ideal built up about him.  And it had not been difficult or insincere to carry on something of the same illusion with regard to the man who had won the Victoria Cross and had been very popular with Tommy Atkins.  David Bright’s very reserves, the closed doors in his domestic life, did not prevent, and indeed in some ways helped, the process.  The mother had known in the depth of her heart that Rose was lonely, but then she was childless.  Rose had never, even in moments when the nameless mystery that was in her home oppressed her most in its dull, voiceless way, tried to tell her mother what she did not herself understand.  Sir David had been courteous, gentle, attentive, but never happy.  Rose knew now that he had always been guiltily afraid.