When the lunches were ready Claire and Philip started. At the door she paused and said gaily: "Keep the house warm for our returning, Lawrence."
He was sullenly angry and made no reply. The frank way in which she spoke of herself and Philip somehow recalled to his mind other couples, married lovers starting out somewhere, and his heart tightened perceptibly. After they were gone he sat thinking for a long time, and his impulsive feeling clarified into certainty. Claire and Philip were in love. Perhaps they did not know it yet themselves, and had not spoken, perhaps they had; at any rate, they were in love. It had grown between them in his very presence, and he, doubly blind fool, had not known. If he could have seen, it would have been clear to him, of course.
He thought of Claire's husband, and grew virtuously angry at Claire. Howard Barkley would mourn his days out, never knowing that his beloved wife was living in Bolivia with a Spanish trapper! He saw Claire going about the cabin as Philip's wife and doing for love the things she now did out of a desire to be of use, and his rage grew. Was it not for love that she did them now? But she was just as thoughtful of him as she was of Philip. "Of course, idiot," he muttered, "she pities you; you poor, abandoned, blind man, you are to be cared for, don't you see?" He strove to shake himself into a different mood by self-ridicule. Was this the philosopher who made life a matter of calm acceptance of circumstances which he knew to be his master? He laughed at himself, but the laugh was bitter, and he knew that he was not willing to accept this particular turn of circumstances.
But what right had he to judge what she did? She was not his wife nor the woman who would be his wife. She could never be his wife. There was her husband. No, it was not her husband that counted, but Philip! Suddenly Lawrence realized the point that he had reached.
The admission of that at last in frank, utter avowal set him dreaming of the joys she might have been to him. He thought of a thousand little intimacies, cares, thoughtfulnesses, that she might have given him and received from him, and they were all made vital, real, by the now ardent memory of her in his arms, of the hands he had held in his own so often of late in the open.