So Belle poured out the tea and admired the pheasants, to John Raby's great contentment; though in his innermost heart he felt a little manly contempt for the feminine want of backbone which rendered such pliability possible. Only once did she show signs of the unstilled tempest of thought which lay beneath her calm manner. It was when, later on in the evening during their nightly game of _écarté_, he complimented her on some _coup_, remarking that her skill seemed inherited. Then she started as if the cards she was handling had stung her, and her face flushed crimson with mingled pain and resentment; yet in her homeless life she had necessarily learned betimes the give and take required in most human intercourse. The fact was that already (though she knew it not) her husband was on his trial, and she could no longer treat his lightest word or look with the reasonable allowances she would have accorded to a stranger. A man is seldom foolish enough to expect perfection in a wife; a woman from her babyhood is taught to find it in her husband, and brought up to believe that the deadliest sin a good woman can commit is to see a spot in her sun. She may be a faithful wife, a kindly companion, a veritable helpmate; but if the partner of her joys and sorrows is not, for her, the incarnation of all manly virtues, or at least the man she would have chosen out of all the world, her marriage must be deemed a failure. Love, that mysterious young juggler, is not there to change duty into something which we are told is better than duty, and so the simple, single-hearted performance of a simple, perfectly natural contract becomes degradation.
Belle, confused yet resentful, lay awake long after her husband slept the sleep of the selfish. Her slow tears wetted her own pillow quietly, decorously, lest they might disturb the Great Mogul's slumbers. Yet she could scarcely have told why the tears came at all, for a curious numbness was at her heart. Even the thought of her dead father had already lost its power to give keen pain, and she was in a vague way shocked at the ease with which her new knowledge fitted into the old. The fact being, that now she dared to look it full in the face without reservation, the loving compassion, the almost divine pity which had been with her ever since the day when poor Dick had first opened her eyes to the feet of clay, seemed no stranger, but a familiar friend. Then Philip Marsden! Dwell as she might on her own ingratitude, his kindness seemed too good a gift to weep over; and again she stretched out her hands into the darkness, as she had done on the night when her anger had risen hot against the man she misjudged; but this time it was to call to him with a very passion of repentance, "_Friend, I will take this gift also. In this at least you shall have your way_."