“Oh, she won’t hurt us!” Oldmeadow smiled at her. “It’s rather we who will hurt her—by refusing to lie down with her lamb. If that’s any comfort to you.”
“Not in the least. I’m not being malicious. You don’t call it hurt, then, to be effaced?”
“Smothered in rose-leaves, eh?” he suggested. “It would be suffocating rather than suffering. She does give me that feeling. But you’ll make her suffer—you have, you know—rather than she you.”
“I really don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “You make me quite uncomfortable, Roger. You make me superstitious. She’s done that to me already. I refuse to take her seriously, but I shall avoid her. That’s what it comes to. Like not giving the new moon a chance to look at you over your left shoulder.”
CHAPTER XV
ON a morning in early March Oldmeadow found, among the letters waiting for him on his breakfast-table, one from Nancy. Nancy and he, with all their fondness, seldom wrote to each other and he was aware, on seeing her writing, of the presage of something disagreeable that the unexpected often brings.
“Dear Roger,” he read, and in his first glance he saw his presage fulfilled. “We are in great trouble. Aunt Eleanor has asked me to write because she is too ill and it is to me as well as to her that Meg has written and she wants you to see Barney at once. Here are Meg’s letters. She has gone away with Captain Hayward. Aunt Eleanor and Mother think that Barney may be able to persuade Adrienne to bring her back. No one else, we feel convinced, will have any influence with her. Do anything, anything you can, dear Roger. Mother and I are almost frightened for Aunt Eleanor. She walks about wringing her hands and crying, and she goes up to Meg’s room and opens the door and looks in—as if she could not believe she would not find her there. It is heart-breaking to see her. We depend on you, dear Roger.
“Yours ever
“Nancy.”
“Good Lord!” Oldmeadow muttered while, in lightning flashes, there passed across his mind the face of John the setter and a Pierrot’s face, white under a low line of black velvet. He took up Meg’s letters, written from a Paris hotel.
“Darling Mother, I know it will make you frightfully miserable and I can’t forgive myself for that; but it had to be. Eric and I cared too much and it wasn’t life at all, going on as we were apart. Try, darling Mother, to see it as we do see things nowadays. Adrienne will explain it all—and you must believe her. You know what a saint she is and she has been with us in it all, understanding everything and helping us to be straight. Everything will come right. Iris Hayward will set Eric free, of course; she doesn’t care one bit for him and has made him frightfully unhappy ever since they married, and she wants to marry some one else herself—only of course she’d never be brave enough to do it this way. When Eric is free, we will marry at once and come home, and, you will see, there are so many sensible people nowadays; we shall not have a bad time at all. Everything will come right, I’m sure; and even if it didn’t, in that conventional way—I could not give him up. No one will ever love me as he does.