“Well, anyhow, you know now!” she said curtly; and she thought: “You ought to have known. It was your business to know.” But she was pleased with the way in which he had accepted her criticism, and the gesture with which he threw away the cigar-end struck her as very distinguished.
“That’s all right!” he said dreamily, as if to say: “That’s done with.” And he rose.
Sophia, however, did not stir.
“Your mother’s health is not what it ought to be,” she went on, and gave him a full account of her conversation with the doctor.
“Really!” Cyril murmured, leaning on the mantelpiece with his elbow and looking down at her. “Stirling said that, did he? I should have thought she would have been better where she is, in the Square.”
“Why better in the Square?”
“Oh, I don’t know!”
“Neither do I!”
“She’s always been here.”
“Yes,” said Sophia, “she’s been here a great deal too long.”
“What do you suggest?” Cyril asked, with impatience in his voice against this new anxiety that was being thrust upon him.
“Well,” said Sophia, “what should you say to her coming to London and living with you?”
Cyril started back. Sophia could see that he was genuinely shocked. “I don’t think that would do at all,” he said.
“Why?”
“Oh! I don’t think it would. London wouldn’t suit her. She’s not that sort of woman. I really thought she was quite all right down here. She wouldn’t like London.” He shook his head, looking up at the gas; his eyes had a dangerous glare.
“But supposing she said she did?”
“Look here,” Cyril began in a new and brighter tone. “Why don’t you and she keep house together somewhere? That would be the very—”
He turned his head sharply. There was a noise on the staircase, and the staircase door opened with its eternal creak.
“Yes,” said Sophia. “The Champs Élysées begins at the Place de la Concorde, and ends—. Is that you, Constance?”
The figure of Constance filled the doorway. Her face was troubled. She had heard Cyril in the street, and had come down to see why he remained so long in the parlour. She was astounded to find Sophia with him. There they were, as intimate as cronies, chattering about Paris! Undoubtedly she was jealous! Never did Cyril talk like that to her!
“I thought you were in bed and asleep, Sophia,” she said weakly. “It’s nearly one o’clock.”
“No,” said Sophia. “I didn’t seem to feel like going to bed; and then Cyril happened to come in.”
But neither she nor Cyril could look innocent. And Constance glanced from one to the other apprehensively.
The next morning Cyril received a letter which, he said—with no further explanation—forced him to leave at once. He intimated that there had been danger in his coming just then, and that matters had turned out as he had feared.
“You think over what I said,” he whispered to Sophia when they were alone for an instant, “and let me know.”
VI
A week before Easter the guests of the Rutland Hotel in the Broad Walk, Buxton, being assembled for afternoon tea in the “lounge” of that establishment, witnessed the arrival of two middle-aged ladies and two dogs. Critically to examine newcomers was one of the amusements of the occupants of the lounge. This apartment, furnished “in the oriental style,” made a pretty show among the photographs in the illustrated brochure of the hotel, and, though draughty, it was of all the public rooms the favourite. It was draughty because only separated from the street (if the Broad Walk can be called a street) by two pairs of swinging-doors—in charge of two pageboys. Every visitor entering the hotel was obliged to pass through the lounge, and for newcomers the passage was an ordeal; they were made to feel that they had so much to learn, so much to get accustomed to; like passengers who join a ship at a port of call, they felt that the business lay before them of creating a niche for themselves in a hostile and haughty society. The two ladies produced a fairly favourable impression at the outset by reason of their two dogs. It is not everyone who has the courage to bring dogs into an expensive private hotel; to bring one dog indicates that you are not accustomed to deny yourself small pleasures for the sake of a few extra shillings; to bring two indicates that you have no fear of hotel-managers and that you are in the habit of regarding your own whim as nature’s law. The shorter and stouter of the two ladies did not impose herself with much force on the collective vision of the Rutland; she was dressed in black, not fashionably, though with a certain unpretending richness; her gestures were timid and nervous; evidently she relied upon her tall companion to shield her in the first trying contacts of hotel life. The tall lady was of a different stamp. Handsome, stately, deliberate, and handsomely dressed in colours, she had the assured hard gaze of a person who is thoroughly habituated to the inspection of strangers. She curtly asked one of the pageboys for the manager, and the manager’s wife tripped rapidly down the stairs in response, and was noticeably deferential. Her voice was quiet and commanding, the voice of one who gives orders that are obeyed. The opinion of the lounge was divided as to whether or not they were sisters.
They vanished quietly upstairs in convoy of the manager’s wife, and they did not reappear for the lounge tea, which in any case would have been undrinkably stewed. It then became known, by the agency of one of those guests, to be found in every hotel, who acquire all the secrets of the hotel by the exercise of unabashed curiosity on the personnel, that the two ladies had engaged two bedrooms, Nos. 17 and 18, and the sumptuous private parlour with a balcony on the first floor, styled “C” in the nomenclature of rooms. This fact definitely established the position of the new
