On this restful velvet she walked up and down, again taken up and possessed by the absorption of that which lay before her. Her pride shied and jibbed at the thought of refusing to see any more of Jim Spencer because some slanderous tongue had started a vile falsehood about her, and she told herself that to do this would but confirm these inventions in the minds of such people as could ever have entertained them. She knew well enough the form the story would take. It would be supposed that the report had got to Jack's ears, and that he forbade her to see him. This would be intolerable; intolerable also was the thing itself, that she should not see him. So much she confessed frankly to herself. But one thing, one thing above all, was certain, and the thought brought to her the glow which is inseparable from all honest endeavour. She had been slandered in a way that touched her with deep resentment, but never should she give that lie a moment's harbourage, even on the threshold of her thoughts. The vileness of it, indeed, was a safeguard, and she could not without shuddering picture herself touching the subject-matter of it.
She had not walked long before a servant came out and approached her.
"Mr. Spencer wants to know if your ladyship will see him," he said.
Marie paused, feeling suddenly that this had happened before, but was unable to recollect what came next.
Marie turned away from the man without replying, and walked a pace or two from him. Her mind seemed to be making itself up without any volition on her part. Then, without turning her head, "Ask him to come out," she answered, and the sound of the utterly commonplace words conveyed to her the nature of her own decision; for she had yielded, and knew it, not to be the imperative demand of her pride, which insisted that she should show not the smallest change of behaviour towards him, just because people had lied about her, but to her imperative desire to see the man.
She walked back to where the tea-table still stood, with the shining points of sunlight that filtered through the cedar making stars on the silver, and sat there a moment listening with a sort of incredulous wonder to the hammer of her pulse, and observing with the same incapacity for belief that these were her hands which trembled. But the interval was a short one, for in a moment his step sounded crisp on the terrace, and then became noiseless on the lawn. She was sitting with her back to the quarter of advance, but turned her head as he approached.