sometimes with a sudden furious beating of the heart he fancied that she was coming back to him again because she would make little half movements towards him and then draw back. Once he found her crying.
The impulse to beg her to confide in him was almost stronger than he could resist, and yet he was terrified lest by some sudden move he should frighten her and drive her back and so lose the little ground that he had gained. The strangest thing of all was that Mrs. Rossiter herself did not know what Clare's trouble was. She, of course, put it all down to Peter, but she could accuse him of nothing specific. Clare had not confided in her.
Did Cards know? Peter sudddenly asked himself with a strange pang of jealousy. That he should be jealous of Cards, the most splendid, most honourable fellow in the world! That, of course, was absurd. And yet they were together so often, and it was with Jerry Cardillac alone that Clare seemed now at ease.
But Peter put all such thoughts at once away from him. Had it been any other man but Cards he might have wondered . . . but he would trust Cards alone with his wife in the wilderness and know that no ill could come of it. With other women Cards might have few scruples—Peter had heard such stories—but with Peter's wife, no.
Peter wondered whether perhaps Clare did not miss young Stephen more than they knew! Oh, if that were the reason how he could take her into his arms and comfort her and love her! Poor little Clare . . . the time would come when she would show him that she wanted him.
Meanwhile the months passed, the proofs of “Mortimer Stant” had been corrected and the book was about to appear. To Peter now everything seemed to hang upon this event. It became with him, during the weeks before its appearance, a monomania. If this book were a success why then Clare and Mrs. Rossiter and all of them would come round to him. It was the third book which was always so decisive, and there was ground to recover after the comparative failure of the second novel. As he corrected the proofs he persuaded himself that “Mortimer Stant” wasn't, after all, so bad. It had been ambitious of him, of course, to write about the emotions and experiences of a man of forty and
