“McDonald believed it all right…and upon my word, when I look at it through his eyes, I cannot altogether blame him.”
“Can’t you?” said Prudence, still quietly, and avoiding his eyes. “Well, I can; I blame him; he had no sort of right to think it of you.”
There was a little silence, and then Temple began:
“You know Ben came up here to see me, to tell me he wouldn’t go on with the experiment any longer?”
Prudence nodded her head. “I guessed as much,” she said.
“And I,” said Temple, in a voice of real pain, “I lost my cursèd temper with him…He said something about giving it up because you wanted him to…and…and I have always been jealous of the affection between you two!…But no one, not even you, Prudence, can blame me more severely than I blame myself.”
Prudence opened her large and beautiful eyes, genuinely shocked.
“Blame you!” she said, “who am I that I should blame you?” with a clarity of insight seldom vouchsafed to her. “All my blame is for myself, how could I for a moment believe, as I did, that you and Ben were smuggling drugs…it was all very well for the police to suspect you…but in me it was abominable,” and without a shade of coquetry in mind or manner she exclaimed:
“Why, I’ll order myself lowly and reverently towards you all my life…you are my bet—” Here her sentence came to an abrupt conclusion. Silence reigned for some time. Then Temple said in a voice of deep satisfaction:
“I had no idea there was anything so good in all the world.”
Prudence’s reply was inaudible.
A little later they were sitting on a sofa together, and Temple regarded with infinite content the bronze head against his shoulder.
“I have always held that if you go for a thing with sufficient determination, you can get it…eventually,” he said.
“There is such a thing,” said Prudence gently, after a short silence, “as a broken engagement. Especially when people are too cocksure…too self-satisfied.”
“Darling!…” said Temple, “darling!…Now are you going to talk more of broken engagements?”
“No,” said Prudence, sitting up and looking a little ruffled and bewildered.
“I think I’m not used to you yet,” she said hesitatingly, “you sort of take away all my feelings of independence; but you wait till I am used to you—you just wait!”
“I am writing for a special licence to-night; we’ll be married by the end of the week, and then there’ll be no more talk of independence.”
It was a source of great satisfaction to Thomas Skipwith that events should turn out as they did; and when on one occasion he went out of his way to inform Prudence that she ought to be grateful to so great an intellect as Temple’s for sparing her a single thought, her meek acceptance of the statement quite frightened him; but marriages, however suitable, seldom afford universal satisfaction, and Laura Heale was never quite reconciled to Prudence’s. It is true that her attitude towards professors in general had been considerably softened by her acquaintance with Skipwith; and after strong representations from her husband, she admitted freely that Temple was justified in having, and even retaining, his own opinions on the injections of dogs; but when she once heard Prudence maintain in public, and that without a blush of shame, that a good seat on a horse was not a necessity to a good man, there was no getting round that. Prudence with all the makings of a fine woman had been ruined; and that by the pernicious influences of Cambridge.
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