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By Root 1114 0

even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that one of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so insistently and so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood152 very well – a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he did not love Miss Lupton… Well, of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving… loving anybody but Leonora. When people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved – but they were poor people – or people not like those she knew.

So these matters presented themselves to Nancy’s mind.

But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to confess to a ‘guilty intimacy’ with some one or other. Nancy imagined that he must have been telling some one his wife’s secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very gentlemanly – it lessened her opinion of Mr Brand. But since she found that Mrs Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr Brand – the mild Mr Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ with his children and kissing his wife when he caught her – Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst possible terms. That was incredible.

Yet there it was – in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand had struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy – nothing real, that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery – but why, she thought, should one? It was probably something like catching salmon out of season – a thing one did not do. She gathered it had something to do with kissing, or holding someone in your arms….

And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was mysterious, terrifying and evil. She felt a sickness – a sickness that grew as she read. Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She asked God how He could permit such things to be. And she was more certain that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Perhaps, then, Edward loved someone else. It was unthinkable.

If he could love someone else than Leonora, her fierce unknown heart suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself? And he did not love her… This had occurred about a month before she got the letter from her mother. She let the matter rest until the sick feeling went off; it did that in a day or two. Then, finding that Leonora’s headaches had gone, she suddenly told Leonora that Mrs Brand had divorced her husband. She asked what, exactly, it all meant.

Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak that she could hardly find the words. She answered just:

‘It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again.’

Nancy said:

‘But… but…’ and then: ‘He will be able to marry Miss Lupton.’ Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes were shut.

‘Then…’ Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror: her brows were tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth were very distinct. In her eyes the whole of that familiar, great hall had a changed aspect. The andirons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal; the burning logs were just logs that were burning and not the comfortable symbols of an indestructible mode of life. The flame fluttered before the high fireback; the St Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she thought that Edward might marry some one else;