"This is Lord Mount Dunstan, father," she said."Since Nigel was brought home, he has been very good to us."Reuben S.Vanderpoel looked well into the man's eyes, as he shook hands with him warmly, and this was what he said to himself:
"Yes, she's safe.This is quite safe.It is to be trusted with the whole thing."Not many days after her husband's arrival at Stornham Court, Mrs.Vanderpoel travelled down from London, and, during her journey, scarcely saw the wintry hedges and bare trees, because, as she sat in her cushioned corner of the railway carriage, she was inwardly offering up gentle, pathetically ardent prayers of gratitude.She was the woman who prays, and the many sad petitions of the past years were being answered at last.She was being allowed to go to Rosy--whatsoever happened, she could never be really parted from her girl again.She asked pardon many times because she had not been able to be really sorry when she had heard of her son-in-law's desperate condition.She could feel pity for him in his awful case, she told herself, but she could not wish for the thing which perhaps she ought to wish for.She had confided this to her husband with innocent, penitent tears, and he had stroked her cheek, which had always been his comforting way since they had been young things together.
"My dear," he said, "if a tiger with hydrophobia were loose among a lot of decent people--or indecent ones, for the matter of that--you would not feel it your duty to be very sorry if, in springing on a group of them, he impaled himself on an iron fence.Don't reproach yourself too much." And, though the realism of the picture he presented was such as to make her exclaim, "No! No!" there were still occasional moments when she breathed a request for pardon if she was hard of heart--this softest of creatures human.
It was arranged by the two who best knew and loved her that her meeting with Rosalie should have no spectators, and that their first hour together should be wholly unbroken in upon.
"You have not seen each other for so long," Betty said, when, on her arrival, she led her at once to the morning-room where Rosy waited, pale with joy, but when the door was opened, though the two figures were swept into each other's arms by one wild, tremulous rush of movement, there were no sounds to be heard, only caught breaths, until the door had closed again.
The talks which took place between Mr.Vanderpoel and Lord Mount Dunstan were many and long, and were of absorbing interest to both.Each presented to the other a new world, and a type of which his previous knowledge had been but incomplete.
"I wonder," Mr.Vanderpoel said, in the course of one of them, "if my world appeals to you as yours appeals to me.
Naturally, from your standpoint, it scarcely seems probable.