But Alston went in a silence he recognised as sulky, and put her into the carriage with a perfect solicitude.
"I must ask you," he said stiffly before he closed the carriage door, "not to mention this to Mrs. Blake."
"Bless you, no," said Madame Beattie. "I'm going to let you stir the pot, you and that imp. Tell him to drive out into the country somewhere for half an hour. I suppose I've got to get the air."
But he was not to escape that particular coil so soon. Back in his office again, giving himself another ten minutes of grave amused consideration, before he called the stenographer, he looked up, at the opening of the door, and saw Anne. She came forward at once and without closing the door, as if to assure him she would not keep him long. There was no misreading the grave trouble of her face. He met her, and now they shook hands, and after he had closed the door he set a chair for her. But Anne refused it.
"I came to tell you how sorry I am to have troubled you so," she began. "Of course Lydia won't go on with this. She won't be allowed to. I don't know what could stop her," Anne admitted truthfully. "But I shall do what I can. Farvie mustn't be told. He'd be horrified. Nor Jeff. I must see what I can do."
"You are very much troubled," said Alston, in a tone of grave concern. It seemed to him Anne was a perfect type of the gentlewoman of another time, not even of his mother's perhaps, but of his grandmother's when ladies were a mixture of fine courage and delicate reserve. That type had, in his earliest youth, seemed inevitable. If his mother had escaped from it, it was because she was the inexplicable wonder of womankind, unlike the rest and rarer than all together.
Anne looked at him, pleading in her eyes.
"Terribly," she said, "terribly troubled. Lydia has always been impulsive, but not unmanageable. And I don't in the least know what to do."
"Suppose you leave it with me," said Alston, his deference an exquisite balm to her hurt feeling. Then he smiled, remembering Lydia. "I don't know what to do either," he said. "Your sister's rather terrifying. But I think we're safe enough so long as she doesn't go to Weedon Moore."
Anne was wordlessly grateful, but he understood her and not only went to the door with her but down the stairs as well. And she walked home treasuring the memory of his smile.