Vavasour neither moved nor spoke, Maria knitted diligently,
and Graham stood gloomily staring down on the music-stool
where Madelon had sat and sung, and looked up at him with that
sudden gleam in her eyes, till, rousing himself, he walked
through the open window, into the garden, across the lawn, to
the shrubbery. He stood leaning over the little gate at the
end of the path, looking over the broad moonlit field, where
the scattered bushes cast strange fantastic shadows, and for
the first time he admitted to himself that he had made a
great, a terrible mistake in life, and he hated himself for
the admission. What indeed were faith, and loyalty, and honour
worth, if they could not keep him true to the girl whose love
he had won five years ago, and to whom he was a thousand times
pledged by every loving promise, every word of affection that
had once passed between them? And yet, was this Maria to whom
he had come back, this Maria so cold and indifferent, so alien
from him in tastes, ideas, sympathies, was she indeed the very
woman who had once won his heart, whom he had chosen as his
life-long companion? How had it all been? He looked back into
the past, to the first days after his return from the Crimea,
when, wounded and helpless, worn out with toil and fever, he
had come back to be tended by Englishwomen in an English home.
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