“Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear,
  Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.”
 
SHAKESPEARE.
 
 
 
“I DON’T much like that horse your husband is riding to-day, my dear,” said Lady Anne, as she sat down to her knitting beside the fire-place. “It’s all very well young men riding these high-spirited animals, breaking them in and so on, but Geoffrey is no longer a young man in that sense of the word. His neck is no longer his own property. He has you to think of and—and—I think you must scold him a little and make him be more cautious.”
 
“I fear I could do little good, my dear Lady Anne,” said Marion, as lightly as she could. “You see bachelor habits are not so easily broken through! It will take some time to teach Geoffrey the double value attached to his neck.”
 
“Ah well,” said the elder lady. “I suppose it would be rather hard on a man to give up what has always been his great amusement. You may be thankful, my dear, that rash riding is the worst ‘bachelor habit’ that you will ever discover in your husband. Except perhaps smoking. Geoffrey does smoke rather too much, I think. Don’t think me impertinent—though I have no boys at home now, I take a great interest in young men, and for years Geoffrey has been like one of our own. As to riding yourself you are very wise to have given it up, my dear. The girls don’t understand, you see. Of course, poor dears, it would not occur to them, or they would not have teased you so. But you are very wise, my dear, very wise indeed to run no risk—not that it might not perhaps do no harm, but it is better not, much better,” she repeated, with sundry grandmotherly nods expressive of the utmost sagacity.
 
Marion looked up with extreme mystification.
 
“I don’t quite understand you, Lady Anne,” she said. “I am not the least nervous about riding, or afraid of its doing me harm in any way. Last year it did me a great deal of good. It is only that just lately I haven’t felt quite in spirits for it.”
 
“Of course not, my dear. It is quite natural you should not feel so. You must not mind me, my dear, but look upon me in the light of a mother. If I can be of use to you in any way you must not hesitate to ask me. It will be quite a pleasure in a year or two to see little people trotting about the Manor Farm—it will brighten up the old place, and Geoffrey is so fond of children.”
 
Marion’s face flushed. Now she understood the good lady’s mysterious allusions. Considerably annoyed, and yet anxious to conceal that she felt so, she replied rather stiffly: “You are very kind, Lady Anne, but I assure you you are quite mistaken. There is no reason of the kind for my giving up riding.”
 
Lady Anne looked incredulous, and before Marion felt sure that she had succeeded in convincing her of the truth of what she had said, their tête-à-tête was interrupted.
 
But it had given a new turn to Marion’s thoughts. Never before in the few unhappy months of her married life had it occurred to her to think of the possibility of her at some future time occupying a new relation, the sweetest, the tenderest of all—that of a mother. And to Geoffrey’s children! Poor Geoffrey, he was “so fond of children,” Lady Anne said. The few simple words softened her to him marvellously. She began to wonder if such a tie might perhaps draw them together, if little arms and innocent baby lips might have power to achieve what at present seemed a hopeless task. Or was it already too late? She did not blame him; in her gentle, womanly mood she blamed no one but herself. It was her own doing; if indeed, as she feared, it was the case, that her husband no longer loved her. These reflections engrossed her during the quiet afternoon, which otherwise she might have found dull and wearisome. She felt surprised when the servant appeared with afternoon tea, and Lady Anne, waking from her peaceful slumber in her arm-chair, began to remark how suddenly it had got dark, and to wonder why the riding party had not yet returned.
 
“Captain Ferndale will be arriving immediately,” she said, “and it will look so awkward if Georgie is not at home.”
 
Marion looked out. Dark, as yet, it was hardly, but dusk decidedly. Much such an afternoon as the one on which, now more than a year ago, Geoffrey had first ventured to tell her of his feelings towards her, which confession she had so ungraciously received.
 
“Why did I not keep to what I said then?” she asked herself. “How much better for both of us had I done so! Poor Geoffrey, he thought me cruel then, how much more reason has he to reproach me now!”
 
She was recalled to the present by Lady Anne’s voice.
 
“Do you see anything of them, my dear?” she asked.
 
“No,” said Marion, listeningly. But almost as she spoke the faint, far-off clatter of approaching horses’ feet became audible. “There they are,” she exclaimed, and a certain feeling of welcome stole into her heart. Somehow she felt anxious to be “good” to Geoffrey; to make up to him, for the morning’s hard, sneering words. With which wish she ran out into the hall to receive her husband and the two girls. They were dismounting as she reached the door. Outside it looked foggy and chilly. She could not clearly distinguish either horses or riders.
 
“You are rather late,” she exclaimed. “Isn’t it very cold? How has Coquette been behaving?”
 
It was Georgie’s voice that replied.
 
“Oh, is that you, Marion? We’ve had such a gallop home. The fog came on so suddenly. Geoffrey is back, of course?”
 
“Geoffrey!” said Marion in surprise. “Why should he be back before you? No, he has not come. I was asking you how his new purchase had been behaving.”
 
“She’s a vixen,” replied Georgie; if I were a gentleman I would call her something worse. Prince and she teazed each other so, that we separated. Geoffrey said he would come home by the fields and take it out of her. We came home by the road; but it is ever so long ago since we separated, and he said he would be home long before us. What can he be about?”
 
A strange sensation crept over Marion. Hardly anxiety, hardly apprehension. Rather a sort of standing still of her whole being with sudden awe, sudden terror of what for the first time darted into her imagination as the possible end of the whole, the solution of the problem of her life-mistake. Like a picture she saw it all before her as if by magic. There been an accident; Geoffrey was killed! She, his wife no longer, but freed by this awful cutting of the knot from the bonds which had galled her so sorely, against which she had murmured so ceaselessly. But was it a feeling of relief which accompanied the vision, which for the moment she believed to be prophetic? Was it not rather a sensation compared to which all her past sufferings seemed trivial and childish—a draught of that bitterest of cups of which it is given to us poor mortals to drink, unavailing, “too late,” self-reproach? If Geoffrey were dead, it seemed to her, his wife, standing there and remembering all, that she and she alone, had killed him. She said not a word. In perfect silence she watched Margaret and Georgie gather up their long muddy skirts and hasten across the hall, peeping in as they passed the open door of the morning-room to reassure their mother’s anxiety. She followed them mechanically; heard, as if in a dream, Lady Anne’s exclamations of concern on hearing that Mr. Baldwin was not with them; and while the good lady trotted off to share her motherly uneasiness with the Squire, at this time of day always ensconced in his private den, Marion crept upstairs to the room in which but a few hours before she had carelessly thrown off her hat and hurried below to risk no chance of a tête-à-tête with her husband! Her evening dress lay on the bed—through the open door into the dressing-room she saw by the firelight Geoffrey’s as yet unopened portmanteau. She shuddered as it caught her eye. Would he ever open it again? Would she ever again hear his voice, see his stalwart figure and fair sunny face? Or how might she not see him? Would they bring him home pale and stiff, stretched out in that long, dreadful way she had once or twice in her London life seen a something that had been a man, carried by to the hospital after some fatal accident? Or, worse still, would his fair hair perhaps be dabbled with blood, his blue eyes distorted with agony, his beautiful face all crushed and disfigured?
 
Ah! It was too horrible.
 
“Forgive me, dear Geoffrey, forgive me,” she said in her remorse, as if her words could reach him. “Oh, God, forgive me for my wickedness, and do not punish me so fearfully. For how can I live, how endure the light of day with the remembrance of what I have done?”
 
Crouched by the fire, she remained thus for some time. Then hearing a slight bustle down-stairs in the hall, she rose and went out into the vestibule, looking over the staircase to see what was taking place below. It was an arrival, but not Geoffrey. Captain Ferndale evidently. She saw little Georgie fly across the hall, followed more deliberately by Margaret and her mother.
 
How happy they all seemed! Had they forgotten all about her, and Geoffrey, out in the fog, alive or dead, nobody seemed to care! But she wronged them. Captain Ferndale was hardly welcomed, before they all began telling him of their anxiety.
 
“Papa has sent out men in all directions,” said Georgie, “I am perfectly certain something must have happened. The horse he was on is a most vicious creature. I was frightened out of my wits when he was riding beside me, though of course I didn’t say so to poor Marion, Mrs. Baldwin, you know, Fred. By-the-by, Maggie, where is she?”
 
“In her room, I think,” said Margaret. “I’ll go and see. We have put back dinner half-an-hour in hopes Geoffrey may come back safe and sound by then. But I confess I am very uneasy.”
 
Marion stole back to her room, and was sitting there quietly when in a minute or two Margaret joined her.
 
“Geoffrey has not come in yet,” said the girl cheerfully as she entered, “but we are not surprised. It is so foggy, Fred. Ferndale says he had hard work to get here from the station.”
 
Marion did not answer. Margaret put her arm round her affectionately; but Marion shrank back, and Margaret felt a little chilled.
 
“You are not uneasy, Mrs. Baldwin?” she said kindly, but a little more stiffly than her wont. “You know your husband is so perfectly to be depended on as a rider. He is sure to be all right.”
 
Marion looked up at her appealingly.
 
“Don’t think me cross or cold, Margaret, and don’t call me Mrs. Baldwin. I am very unhappy.”
 
The expression was a curious one. “Very uneasy;” “dreadfully alarmed,” or some such phrase, would have seemed more suited to the circumstances. Margaret Copley felt puzzled. After all there was something very peculiar about Marion Baldwin; she could not make her out. There she sat staring into the fire, pale but perfectly calm. Not a tear, not a symptom of nervousness; only saying in that quiet, deliberate way that she was “very unhappy.” Margaret was too young, too inexperienced, and too practically ignorant of sorrow to detect the undertone of anguish, of bitter, remorseful misery in the few cold words—“I am very unhappy.”
 
Marion said no more, and Margaret did not disturb her. At last the dinner gong sounded. Marion started: she had not changed her dress.
 
“Never mind,” said Margaret, “come down as you are. Unless you would prefer staying up here.”
 
“Oh, no,” said Marion, “I shall dress very quickly. I shall be ready in five minutes.”
 
She had a morbid horror of appearing affected or exaggerated; and an instinctive determination to keep her feelings to herself. Naturally, she made the mistake of overdoing her part.
 
She dressed quickly, went downstairs and sat through the long, weary dinner; to all appearance the calmest and least uneasy of the party. One after another of the grooms and gardeners, despatched with lanterns in various directions to seek the truant, returned after a fruitless search.
 
The Squire grew more and more fidgety. Lady Anne was all but in tears—Margaret and Georgie unable to eat any dinner. Marion seemed to herself to be standing on the edge of a fearful precipice, down which she dared not look; but she said nothing, and no stranger entering the company would have imagined that she, of all the party, was the one most chiefly concerned in the fate of Geoffrey Baldwin.
 
Dinner over, the ladies mechanically adjourned as usual t............