“Can I tell what is the character of a girl?  She is mild and shy, and extremely gentle.  In all probability she has a passion for battles and bloodshed.  I judged from your father’s point of view.  She has money, and you are to have money; and the union of money and money is supposed to be a good thing.  And besides, you are variable, and off to-morrow what you are on to-day; is it not so? and heiresses are never jilted.  Colonel Barclay is only awaiting your retirement.  Le roi est mort; vive le roi!  Heiresses may cry it like kingdoms.”

“I thought,” said Edward, meaningly, “the colonel had better taste.”

“Do you not know that my friends are my friends because they are not allowed to dream they will do anything else?  If they are taken poorly, I commend them to a sea-voyage—­Africa, the North-West Passage, the source of the Nile.  Men with their vanity wounded may discover wonders!  They return friendly as before, whether they have done the Geographical Society a service or not.  That is, they generally do.”

“Then I begin to fancy I must try those latitudes.”

“Oh! you are my relative.”

He scarcely knew that he had uttered “Margaret.”

She replied to it frankly, “Yes, Cousin Ned.  You have made the voyage, you see, and have come back friends with me.  The variability of opals!  Ah!  Sir John, you join us in season.  We were talking of opals.  Is the opal a gem that stands to represent women?”

Sir John Capes smoothed his knuckles with silken palms, and with courteous antique grin, responded, “It is a gem I would never dare to offer to a lady’s acceptance.”

“It is by repute unlucky; so you never can have done so.

“Exquisite!” exclaimed the veteran in smiles, “if what you deign to imply were only true!”

They entered the drawing-room among the ladies.

Edward whispered in Mrs. Lovell’s ear, “He is in need of the voyage.”

“He is very near it,” she answered in the same key, and swam into general conversation.

Her cold wit, Satanic as the gleam of it struck through his mind, gave him a throb of desire to gain possession of her, and crush her.

CHAPTER XXII

The writing of a letter to Dahlia had previously been attempted and abandoned as a sickening task.  Like an idle boy with his holiday imposition, Edward shelved it among the nightmares, saying, “How can I sit down and lie to her!” and thinking that silence would prepare her bosom for the coming truth.

Silence is commonly the slow poison used by those who mean to murder love.  There is nothing violent about it; no shock is given; Hope is not abruptly strangled, but merely dreams of evil, and fights with gradually stifling shadows.  When the last convulsions come they are not terrific; the frame has been weakened for dissolution; love dies like natural decay.  It seems the kindest way of doing a cruel thing.  But Dahlia wrote, crying out her agony at the torture.  Possibly your nervously organized natures require a modification of the method.