"We have just arrived here from Brindisi," she wrote. "We shall stay here for a few days while I order some gowns, and we shall be in London for a few weeks. After that we go to the General's place near Plymouth, where you must come and see me every day, just as you used at Simla. O Bothwell, I can hardly trust myself to write. I dare not tell you half the joy I feel in the idea of our meeting. If you cared for me you would come to London. It would be so easy to pretend business, and you would be warmly welcomed in Grosvenor Square. You might bring your portmanteau and stop with us. There is a barrack of empty rooms on the third floor. Ours is one of those huge corner houses, and the piggeries for the servants are over the offices at the back. I hope you will contrive to come. Your last letter seemed to me so cold and distant--as if you were beginning to forget, or as if you had not forgiven my anger at your desertion. Ah, Bothwell, you should have pitied me and sympathised with me in that cruel parting. You ought to have known that my anger was despair. But you thought only of your own dignity, your own self-respect--not of my sorrow. Men are so selfish."
Bothwell did not go to London. He excused himself upon various grounds, and remained quietly at Penmorval. But from that hour his manner to Hilda changed altogether. From an unavowed lover he became an indifferent acquaintance. He set a watch upon his tongue that it should say no words of pleasantness. He vowed that he would not again suffer himself to be enmeshed in Lady Valeria's net: but until he had calmly and deliberately broken with her he could not be the lover of any other woman. He made up his mind that so soon as the General and his wife were settled at Fox Hill there should be a rupture--temperate, gentle, firm, and irrevocable.
Lady Valeria came to Fox Hill, and summoned her slave. He went, and there was no rupture--only a renewal of the old bonds. The bird was in the fowler's net again. Bothwell was often at Fox Hill. He spent long afternoons there _tête-à-tête_ with Lady Valeria. She was less careful than she had been in India.
"We are not surrounded with busybodies here," she said. "I feel that I can do as I like in my own house."