She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through his veins.
Suddenly he thought of the “old guard,” and he knew that not one of the truly marvellous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him as this white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did.
“After all,” he thought, “it isn’t the envelope that matters; it is the letter inside.”
Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort of spell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at Lady Sellingworth’s eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite a certain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, he believed that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knew that it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions.
And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What had led her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven that possibly Seymour Portman knew the secret of Lady Sellingworth’s abrupt desertion of the “old guard” and plunge into old age. But even he did not know it. For he loved her in a still, determined, undeviating way. And no woman would care to tell such a secret to a man who loved her and who was almost certain, barring the explosion of a moral bombshell, and perhaps even then, to go on loving her.
No one knew why Lady Sellingworth had abruptly and finally emerged from the world of illusions in which she had lived. But possibly a member of the underworld, a light-fingered gentleman of brazen assurance, had long ago guessed the reason for her sudden departure from the regiment of which she had been a conspicuous member; possibly he had guessed, or surmised, why she had sent in her papers. But even he could scarcely be certain.
Lady Sellingworth belonged to a great English family, and had been brought up in healthy splendour, saved from the canker of too much luxury by the aristocratic love of sport which is a tradition in such English families as hers. As a girl she had been what a certain sporting earl described as “a leggy beauty.” Even then she had shown a decided inclination to run wild and had seldom checked the inclination. Unusually tall and athletic, rather boyish in appearance, and of the thin, greyhound type, she had excelled in games and held her own in sports. She had shot in an era when comparatively few women shot, and in the hunting-field she had shown a reckless courage which had fascinated the hard-riding men who frequented her father’s house. As she grew older her beauty had rapidly developed, and with it an insatiable love of admiration. Early she had realized that she was going to be a beauty, and had privately thanked the gods for her luck. She could scarcely have borne not to be a beauty; but, mercifully, it was all right. Woman’s greatest gift was to be hers. When she looked into the glass and knew that, when she looked into men’s eyes and knew it even more definitely, she felt merciless and eternal. In the dawn no end was in sight; in the dawn no end seemed possible.