after some months oftroubled drifting
There, however, the atmosphere had changed with theconditions. He could not say that she avoided him, or eventhat she was a shade less glad to see him; but she was besetby family duties and, as he thought, a little too readilyresigned to them.
The Marquise de Chantelle, as Darrow soon perceived, had thesame mild formidableness as the late Mr. Leath: a sort ofinsistent self-effacement before which every one about hergave way. It was perhaps the shadow of this lady’spresence–pervasive even during her actual brief eclipses–that subdued and silenced Mrs. Leath. The latter was,moreover, preoccupied about her stepson, who, soon afterreceiving his degree at Harvard, had been rescued from astormy love-affair, and finally, after some months oftroubled drifting, had yielded to his step-mother’s counseland gone up to Oxford for a year of supplementary study.
Thither Mrs. Leath went once or twice to visit him, and herremaining days were packed with family obligations: getting,as she phrased it, "frocks and governesses" for her littlegirl, who had been left in France, and having to devote theremaining hours to long shopping expeditions with hermother-in-law. Nevertheless, during her brief escapes fromduty, Darrow had had time to feel her safe in the custody ofhis devotion, set apart for some inevitable hour; and thelast evening, at the theatre, between the overshadowingMarquise and the unsuspicious Owen, they had had an almostdecisive exchange of words.
Now, in the rattle of the wind about his ears, Darrowcontinued to hear the mocking echo of her message:
"Unexpected obstacle." In such an existence as Mrs. Leath’s,at once so ordered and so exposed, he knew how small acomplication might assume the magnitude of an "obstacle;"yet, even allowing as impartially as his state of mindpermitted for the fact that, with her mother-in-law always,and her stepson intermittently, under her roof, her lotinvolved a hundred small accommodations generally foreign tothe freedom of widowhood–even so, he could not but thinkthat the very ingenuity bred of such conditions might havehelped her to find a way out of them. No, her "reason",whatever it was, could, in this case, be nothing but apretext; unless he leaned to the less flattering alternativethat any reason seemed good enough for postponing him!
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