Happiness
and content are frail plants which can only flourish under fair
conditions if at all. Certainly they will not thrive beneath the gloom
and shadow of a pall, and when the heart is dead no triumphs, however
splendid, and no rewards, however great, can compensate for an utter and
irredeemable loss. She never guessed, poor girl, that time upon time, in
the decades to be, Geoffrey would gladly have laid his honours down in
payment for one year of her dear and unforgotten presence. She was too
unselfish; she did not think that a man could thus prize a woman's
love, and took it for an axiom that to succeed in life was his one real
object--a thing to which so divine a gift as she had given Geoffrey is
as nothing. It was therefore this Juggernaut of her lover's career that
Beatrice would cast down her life, little knowing that thereby she must
turn the worldly and temporal success, which he already held so cheap,
to bitterness and ashes.
At Chester Beatrice got out of the train and posted her letter to
Geoffrey. She would not do so till then because it might have reached
him too soon--before all was finished! Now it would be delivered to him
in the House after everything had been accomplished in its order.
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