Quick as she was, Bethune was before her. He opened the door for her to pass. His air of detachment, the banality of the courtesy, seemed to her an insult; she flung a look of scathing reproach at him as she flounced by.
With Sir Arthur's letter clutched in her hand she sought refuge in her own room; and there on the small white bed shed some of the bitterest and angriest tears she had ever known. The thought of the two in the attic room galled her beyond endurance.
"Hasn't she had two husbands already?" sobbed she to herself, catching at the crudest conclusions with all the inconsequence of her years, "and couldn't she leave just this one man alone? ... 'You disturb me'—oh!"
Yet Bethune had remained in the attic scarcely a minute after Aspasia herself had left it. When he had returned to the table, Lady Gerardine had gazed at him a span or two with vague eyes—then she had passed her hand over her forehead, sighed wearily, and fallen into her seat.
"I can do no more to-day!" she had said. "Take those papers. You see I have copied out all in sequence, even the most trivial detail, till the Sandhurst examination. Make what use of them you like. I—forgive me, it is very stupid—but I feel troubled. And please—do not talk to me about this any more until I ask you to."
So she had dismissed him. And, dismissed, he returned to the study, which had been allotted for his use, and placed her voluminous notes with his own typewritten manuscript, pending the task of collation. Then he fell into a long reverie, and his thoughts were neither of Harry English nor of Miss Aspasia Cuningham.
* * * * *
But even in anger Baby was loyal; some instinct, rather than any positive train of reasoning, told her that Sir Arthur's arrival at the present juncture would inevitably precipitate matters to a most undesirable climax. On the other hand: how keep him away if his wife persisted in her attitude of indifference and silence? ...
"Good gracious, we'll have Runkle turning up in a special train before the week's out!" How to prevent it?
With much labour she finally concocted and despatched a telegram of Machiavellian artfulness to await arrival at Claridge's, taking further upon herself to sign it in Lady Gerardine's name: