Prisoners | Page 5

unjust to both of them. And people would begin to talk at once if she
and her cousin (Michael was only a distant connection) were studiously
to avoid each other, if they could not exchange a few words simply like
old friends. No one had suggested an attitude of rigid avoidance; but
throughout life Fay had always convinced herself of the advisability of
a certain wished-for course by conjuring up, only to discard it, the
extreme and most obviously senseless opposite of that course--as the
only alternative.
She imagined her husband saying: "Why won't you ask Mr. Carstairs to
dinner? He is your cousin and he is charming. What can the reason be
that you so earnestly refuse to meet him?" And then Andrea, who
always "got ideas into his head," would begin to suspect that there had
been "something" between them.
No. No. It would be far wiser to meet naturally now and then, and to
treat Michael like an old friend. Fay had a somewhat muffled
conception of what an old friend might be. After deep thought she came
to the conclusion that it was her duty to ask Michael frequently to the
house. When Fay once recognised a duty she performed it without
delay.
She met with an unexpected obstacle in the way of its adequate
performance. The obstacle was Michael.
The young man came once, and then again after an interval of several
months, but apparently nothing would induce him to frequent the
house.

Fay did not recognise her boyish eager lover in the grave sedate man,
old of his age, who had replaced him. His dignified and quite
unobtrusive resistance, which had not indifference at its core, added an
intense, a feverish, interest to Fay's life. She saw that he still cared for
her, and that he did not intend to wound himself a second time. He had
had enough. She put out all her little transparent arts during the months
that followed. The duke watched.
She had implied to her husband with a smile that she had not been very
happy at home. She implied to Michael with a smile that it was not the
duke's fault, but that she was not very happy in her married life, that he
did not care much about her, and that they had but few tastes in
common. Each lived their own life on amicable terms, but somewhat
apart from each other. She owned that she had hoped for something
rather different in marriage. She had, it seemed, started life with a very
exalted ideal of married life, which the duke's
coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb.
Michael remained outwardly obdurate, but inwardly he weakened. His
tender adoration and respect for Fay, wounded and mutilated though
they had been, had nevertheless survived what in many minds must
have proved their death-blow. He still believed implicitly all she said.
But to him her marriage was the impassable barrier, a barrier as
enfranchisable as the brown earth on a coffin lid.
After many months Fay at last vaguely realised his attitude towards her.
She told herself that she respected it, that it was just what she wished,
was in fact the result of her own tactfully expressed wishes. She
seemed to remember things she had said which would have led him to
behave just as he had done. And then she turned heaven and earth to
regain her personal ascendency over him. She never would have
regained it if an accident had not befallen her. She fell in love with him
during the process.
The day came, an evil day for Michael, when he could no longer doubt
it, when he was not permitted to remain in doubt. Who shall say what

waves of boundless devotion, what passionate impulses of protection,
of compassion, of intense longing to shield her from the fire which had
devastated his own youth, passed in succession over him as he looked
at the delicate little creature who was to him the only real woman in the
world--all the rest were counterfeits--and who now, as he believed,
loved him as he had long loved her.
Michael was one of the few men who bear through life the common
masculine burden of a profound ignorance of women, coupled with an
undeviating loyalty towards them. He supposed she was suffering as he
had suffered, that it was with her now beside the fountain, under the
ilexes of her Italian garden, as it had been with him during these five
intolerable years.
How Fay wept! What a passion of tears, till her small flower-like face
was bereft of all beauty, of everything except a hideous contraction of
grief!
He stood near her, not touching her, in anguish far deeper than hers. At
last he took her clenched hand in