“I go into the world! You haven’t seen me, Sir Donald.”
She saw an expression of nervous apprehension come into his face as he glanced at her veil.
“What are you going to do, then?” he said.
“I don’t know. I--I want a hiding-place.”
She saw tears come into his old, faded eyes.
“A hiding-place. I want to travel a long way off and be quite alone, and think, and see how I can go on, if I can go on.”
“If I could do something--anything for you!” he murmured.
“You fancy you are still speaking to the woman who sang, Sir Donald.”
“Would you--” Suddenly he spoke with some eagerness. “You want to go away, to be alone?”
“To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn’t I?”
“Ah, that--will you have it for a while?”
“I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will be perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there--peace. And I--I shall be on the lake, not far off.”
“You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me.”
“I should never send for you or for anyone.”
She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she accepted Sir Donald’s offer.
And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her French maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate herself with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.
LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare. When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.
She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman--she was a dreadful-looking human being.