“And it was quite useless? You’d no chance with Meg at all?”
“None whatever. Quite useless. Never was such a wild-goose chase. It was exactly as Adrienne had said.”
“Still it couldn’t have been foreseen so securely by anyone but Adrienne. Many girls would have jumped at the chance.”
“Not if they’d had Adrienne to help them. We might have realized that. That’s what armed Meg. I heard Adrienne in everything she said. Even Mother thinks Adrienne was right, now, you know, Roger. And it was all for Mother, wasn’t it? that I went. That makes it all so particularly ironic. Only dear Mummy was never very strong at logic. She takes the line now that we’re narrow-minded conventionalists, you and I, for thinking that a girl oughtn’t to go off with a married man. I can’t feel that, you know, Roger,” said Barney in his listless tone. “I can’t help feeling that Meg has done something shameful. You ought to have seen her! Positively smug! sitting there with that ass of a fellow in that damned Riviera hotel! I had the horridest feeling, too, that Meg had brought him rather than he her. I don’t mean he doesn’t care for her—he does; I’ll say that for him. He’s a stupid fellow, but honest; and he came outside and tried to tell me what he felt and how it would be all right and that he was going to devote his life to her. But I think he feels pretty sick, really. While Meg treated me as if I were a silly little boy. If anyone can carry the thing through, Meg will.”
“It won’t prove her right because she carries it through, you know,” Oldmeadow observed.
“No,” said Barney, “but it will make us seem more wrong. Not that you have any responsibility in it, dear old boy. I did what I felt I must do and mine was the mistake. It’s not only Mother who thinks I’ve wronged Adrienne,” he went on after a moment, lifting his arms as though he felt a weight upon them and clasping them behind his head. “Even Nancy, though she was so sorry for me, made me feel that I’d done something very dreadful.”
“Nancy? How did you come to see Nancy?”
“Why, at Coldbrooks. She’s still there with Aunt Monica. That was just it. It was my going there first, seeing her first, that upset her so. She couldn’t understand, till I could explain, how it came about. She was thinking of Adrienne, you see. And I, knowing nothing, had been thinking of Mother all the time. It was too late, then, to go back at once. The next train wasn’t for three hours. So I had to stay.”
“And it was Nancy who had to tell you everything?”
“Yes; Nancy,” said Barney, staring at the ceiling. There was a note, now, of control in his voice and Oldmeadow knew that if he had said no word of what must be foremost in both their thoughts it was because he could not trust himself to speak of it. And he went on quickly, taking refuge from his invading emotion, “Aunt Monica wasn’t there. I didn’t even see Johnson. I went right through the house and into the garden and there was Nancy, planting something in the border. Everything looked so natural. I just went up to her and said ‘Hello, Nancy,’ and then, when she looked up at me, I thought she was going to faint. Poor little Nancy. I knew something terrible had happened from the way she looked at me.”