After awhile he became the intimate friend of her
husband, herself, and her child. Something, indeed, had happened to his
affection for her. He felt himself in no danger beside her, so far as
passion was concerned; and he knew very well that she would have
banished him forever at a moment's notice rather than give her husband
an hour's uneasiness. But to be near her, to be in her world, consulted,
trusted, and flattered by her, to slip daily into his accustomed chair,
to feel year by year the strands of friendship and of intimacy woven
more closely between him and her--between him and hers--these things
gradually filled all the space in his life left by politics or by
thought. They deprived him of any other home, and this home became a
necessity.
Then Henry Marsham died. Once more Ferrier asked Lady Lucy to marry him,
and again she refused. He acquiesced; their old friendship was resumed;
but, once more, with a difference. In a sense he had no longer any
illusions about her. He saw that while she believed herself to be acting
under the influence of religion and other high matters, she was, in
truth, a narrow and rather cold-hearted woman, with a strong element of
worldliness, disguised in much placid moralizing.
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