Chapter 7

It was the very morning after this that Stephen was late for breakfast for the first time for years, and Virginia got down before him and found a postcard in her mother’s handwriting among the letters, with a picture on it of some place in the Isle of Wight and these words: You have helped me to happiness. Catherine Monckton.

She stared at it puzzled. She was still more puzzled when, turning it over again and looking at the address, she saw it was for Stephen, not for her.

Stephen had helped her mother to happiness? It would be just like him, of course—their reconciliation the night before had been utter and wonderful—but how? What had he had to do with it? He who only now, only yesterday, had come round to not disapproving any longer of the marriage?

She was still holding the postcard in her hand, vainly trying to make head or tail of it, when he came in.

‘It seems,’ she said, going to meet him with the quick steps and the radiant smile of love that is very proud, ‘that I still don’t know all your goodness, dear husband.’

‘What is it, my own wife?’ he asked, gazing at her upturned face with the glad content of the readmitted into paradise.

‘Why, look——’ And she gave him the postcard.

He turned a deep red. She took that for modesty, and laughed with pride in him. What he could have done and why he had done it she didn’t know, but she loved him with a positively burning faith.

Stephen, reading the words on the postcard, deduced that the marriage, which he had supposed had taken place a month or six weeks before, had in fact only just done so, for he believed no lasting happiness could be the lot of the ex-Mrs. Cumfrit, and gave her and her unfortunate victim two or three days of it at most before remorse and disillusionment set in. They were evidently at the very beginning of their two or three days when the card was written. He had had no wish at all, he knew, to help his mother-in-law to happiness. Expiation only was what he had had in mind. That expiation should be a happiness-giving process had not occurred to him as possible. And here was Virginia, praising and blessing him; here was this young unsullied spirit once more making him, by her belief and pride in his goodness, feel ashamed of himself. Also, how awkward it was. Why could not Mrs. Cumfrit have announced she was now Monckton in an ordinary manner, without dragging him into it?