CHAPTER IV

In those last few days he deliberately kept his thoughts away from Muriel. Not that he was distressed by any bitterness; perhaps a little bitterness, a resentment of her injustice, would have comforted him. The inexplicable reasons of her action he ceased to ponder, and the consequences, he felt, were not his. Vernley had wanted to talk. Curiously, he now saw, Vernley revolted far more than he against the accomplished fact of her marriage. Why did she marry him? Was she in her right senses? Was she a nervous wreck? Could she possibly love this man? How could she treat her lover so callously?--all these aspects of the enigma worried Vernley in succession, and ceaselessly he battered himself, mothwise, against the undiminished, glaring fact of Muriel's marriage to a stranger. All this had not helped John, and he had tried to make Vernley see it, but the latter fretted ceaselessly against the finality of her folly.

"I don't understand women--I don't really. If ever a girl was madly in love, she was with you. She grew up with the idea of marrying you--and suddenly she turns round and bolts without reason."

And John felt also that Vernley could not understand his attitude. Vernley did not realise that henceforth he had ceased to feel anything, that he was just numb to life. Muriel had written after that dreadful interview. She made no excuses, gave no explanations, only she wanted him to know that always he had been first in her thoughts. He laughed when he read the letter, and in a vindictive moment felt he would like to ask her one question. "Who is first now?" For he knew that would distress her intensely. She could not possibly love this man, he was sure of that. She had mistaken motherliness and the protective instinct for the deeper emotions of love, and in a temporary aberration had seen in self-sacrifice something greater than a love which had encountered no real obstacles.

Had he but known, as he thought this, she was sitting in Mrs. Graham's flat seeking confirmation of her act. Mrs. Graham listened to her sympathetically, but gave her no comfort, for she affected no compromise with the hard fact that Muriel had not married the man she loved.

"Am I to blame, Mrs. Graham?--oh yes, I am, I am, but he must know I am not callous--that I still--"

Mrs. Graham smiled gently, and took the nervously clasped hands in hers.

"Muriel--in all you've said when you have said 'him', you have meant John. Need we disguise that? You can no more explain than I can. We women will never know why we throw away our lives."

At that the young wife broke down and wept in the other woman's arms.

"What can I do, what can I do?" she implored.

"Nothing," said Mrs. Graham. "My dear child you are not the first or the last sacrifice to impulse. You are not going to suffer long; your husband needs you so greatly and I think we women, if we realize it early enough, are only lastingly in love when we are happy in self-sacrifice."

She felt Muriel quiver in her arms and held her a while. Half an hour later, composed again, she went, but not before she had talked of her husband, of his cheerfulness, his eagerness to follow all she