These weeks had given her a hint, a foretaste, of what would be hers, and once more, as in her maidenhood, she felt that she would have made any marriage in order to robe herself thus. The splendour of what she was lent had set light to her old ambitions again, and this was all to be hers, not lent, but her own. She would enter into the fabled inheritance of the legend, that legend to which, for its very remoteness, she had never given two serious thoughts. But now, though it still wore, like a cloak over its head, its unconvincing mediævalism, the shape of it vaguely outlined and indifferently regarded, had something sinister about it. It did not matter; it was only an ugly shadow in the background, but now she averted her eyes from it, instead of merely not noticing it.
Here, then, was the second undercurrent, which, sluggish and veiled, yet steadily moved within her. For though with the passing of the inheritance to her, it would be she who came within the scope and focus of the legend, which, frankly, when looked in the face, presented that meaningless, age-worn countenance, she felt that she was in the grip of it not directly but, somehow, through Colin. She told herself that by no combination of diabolical circumstance could that be; for, with the knowledge that was hers about the date of Colin’s birth and his mother’s marriage, it was he, he and Raymond, who had passed out of reach of the parchment with its promises and its penalty. Yet instinct, unconvinced by reason, told her that it was through Colin that she and the children she would bear him, would be swept into the mysterious incredible eddy. Was it the persistent luck that attended him which induced so wildly superstitious a presage? Like some supernaturally protected being, he passed along his way. Raymond’s attempt to kill him had, by the merest most fortuitous circumstance of a punctured tyre, led to Raymond’s utter helplessness in his hands.... Colin moved on a charmed pilgrimage, idolised and adored by herself, by his father, by all who came in contact with him and, she was beginning to see, he had no spark of love in him that was kindled by these fires. Analyse him and you would find no faintest trace of it. Perhaps, in spite of his twenty-one years now so nearly complete, he had remained a child still in respect of the heart’s emotions. Yet who could hate like Colin? Who, so she shuddered to think, could have shewn, though but for a second, so white-hot a mask of fury as he had once turned on herself?