This is what he read.
"My dear Gerty,—This is to tell you that I am not coming home to-night—am not coming home again at all, in fact. I am going to marry Mr. Darrell, who will take me to Italy, where the weather is decent, and where I shall get well. For you know, I am horribly seedy, Gerty, and very dull.
"Of course you will be angry with me; you never liked Sidney, and you will think it ungrateful of me, perhaps, to go off like this. But oh, Gerty, it has been so dismal, especially since we heard about poor little Frank. Sidney hates a fuss, and so do I. We both of us prefer to go off on the Q.T., as Fred says. With love from
"Phyllis."
As Lord Watergate finished this characteristic epistle, an exclamation more fraught with horror than Gertrude's own burst from his lips. He strode across the room, crushing the paper in his hands.
"Lord Watergate!" Gertrude faced him, pale, questioning: a nameless dread clutched at her.
Something in her face struck him. Stopping short in front of her, in tones half paralysed with horror, he said—
"Don't you know?"
"Do I know?" she echoed his words, bewildered.
"Darrell is married. He does not live with his wife; but it is no secret."
The red tables and chairs, the lamp, Lord Watergate himself, whose voice sounded fierce and angry, were whirling round Gertrude in hopeless confusion; and then suddenly she remembered that this was an old story; that she had known it always, from the first moment when she had looked upon Darrell's face.
Gertrude closed her eyes, but she did not faint. She remained standing, while one hand rested on the table for support. Yes, she had known it; had stood by powerless, paralysed, while this thing approached; had seen it even as Cassandra saw from afar the horror which she had been unable to avert.