He shrugged his shoulders--paused--sat up and flicked a large moth off the arm of his chair. Then,
“Goodness only knows,” he said. “Goodness, and themselves. I suppose they found it out too late. That is one of the little risks of life.”
“Do you think,” he went on, “that there will be a special Hell in the Hereafter for parents who have sacrificed their children's lives to their own ambition? I hope there will be.”
“I have never given the matter the consideration it deserves,” she answered. “Was that the reason? Is Lady Cantourne a more important person than Lady Meredith?”
She gave a little nod of comprehension, as if he had raised a curtain for her to see into his life--into the far perspective of it, reaching back into the dim distance of fifty years before. For our lives do reach back into the lives of our fathers and grandfathers; the beginnings made there come down into our daily existence, shaping our thought and action. That which stood between Sir John Meredith and his son was not so much the present personality of Millicent Chyne as the past shadows of a disappointed life, an unloved wife and an unsympathetic mother. And these things Jocelyn Gordon knew while she sat, gazing with thoughtful eyes, wherein something lived and burned of which she was almost ignorant--gazing through the tendrils of the creeping flowers that hung around them.
At last Jack Meredith rose briskly, watch in hand, and Jocelyn came back to things of earth with a quick gasping sigh which took her by surprise.
“Miss Gordon, will you do something for me?”
He tore a leaf from his pocket-book, and, going to the table, he wrote on the paper with a pencil pendent at his watch-chain.
“The last few days,” he explained while he wrote, “have awakened me to the lamentable fact that human life is rather an uncertain affair.”
He came towards her, holding out the paper.
“If you hear--if anything happens to me, would you be so kind as to write to Millicent and tell her of it? That is the address.”
She took the paper, and read the address with a dull sort of interest.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, if you like. But--nothing must happen to you.”
There was a slight unsteadiness in her voice, which made her stop suddenly. She did not fold the paper, but continued to read the address.