"Have you told Athena?" Wantele was ashamed of the question, but burning curiosity and jealous pain impelled him to ask it.
"Yes, I told her this morning. But, Dick, I want to tell you, I think I ought to tell you, that I don't----" she hesitated, hardly knowing how to frame her sentence--"I don't blame Athena. I'm sure she couldn't help what's happened."
"You press very hardly on Lingard, Jane."
He spoke with a terrible irony, but Jane did not understand.
"No, no!" she cried, distressed. "I press hard on nobody, least of all on Hew."
"Quand le coeur reste fidèle, les vilenies du corps sont peu de chose. Quand le coeur a trahi, le reste n'est plus rien."
Athena, sitting alone in the boudoir, heard the return of the two men; but she waited in vain for Lingard to come to her, as he always did come to her, with that blind longing for her presence which he was only now, with dawning consciousness, beginning to resist.
To-night instinct, the wise instinct which always stood her in good stead in all her dealings with men, warned her against seeking him out.
Mrs. Maule had no wish to make Lingard either an unwilling or even a willing accomplice in the scheme which was to result in their ultimate happiness. She had gone quite as far as she dared to go with him the night before. Treachery is one of the few burdens which a human being can bear better alone than in company.
Athena realised that Lingard now regarded his violent, unreasoning attraction to herself as a thing of which to be mortally ashamed. But she was convinced that, once his engagement to Jane Oglander was at an end, he would "let himself go," especially if he was convinced that she, Athena, had been blameless.
And her instinct served her truly. Lingard, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the long day spent away from Rede Place, was in no mood for a renewal of the sentimental dalliance to which Athena had accustomed him.
What had happened--the quick exchange of words, his echo of Mrs. Maule's longing for freedom from a tie which she had led him to believe had ever lacked reality, had brought him, and roughly, to his bearings.
The evening which had followed, spent in company with the two women--the woman to whom he owed allegiance, and whom he had held but a few hours before in his arms, and that other woman who had provoked the unreal words of which he was now ashamed, had contained some of the most odious moments of his life.