“I’m hanged if it will be all right!” said Captain Thornton.
Vera made no attempt to reinstate herself. It was part of her strength never to try to recover what was lost. She kept up appearances, it is true, but that was for her own sake rather than in any hope, or even wish, to regain his good opinion. When we all met at tea, she came trailing in, with Chang under her arm, and as she sank into her place, diffusing the suavest unconsciousness, she said to Mrs. Travers-Cray:
“Charlie Carlton’s been killed, have you heard? This war is something more than I can bear.”
Charlie Carlton, as I knew, was a cousin of the recent callers and a most remote friend of Vera’s; but it was the best that she could do for the occasion, and all that she was inclined to do, though a melancholy smile, as impersonal as it was impartial, was turned more than once on Captain Thornton and Mollie as she inquired whether they liked sugar in their tea or had enough cream. She had made their tea for six weeks now, and after the first week she had never forgotten that they both liked sugar and both disliked cream. But she thus washed her hands of intimacy while keeping up the graces of hostess-ship. They might have arrived that afternoon.
Mollie and her husband rose beautifully to the situation, for their last two days at Compton Dally; that is, Mollie rose, for the husband at such times has only to follow and be silent. I don’t think that she could have shown a grace and a distance as achieved as Vera’s had it not been for those charming clothes of hers. You must have something to rise from if you are to float serenely above people’s heads; otherwise you merely stand on tiptoe, very uncomfortably. Mollie and Vera might have been two silken balloons, passing and repassing suavely in the dulcet summer air. And on the last day Vera’s sense of dramatic fitness prompted her, evidently, to the most imperturbable volte-face: she showed to Mollie a marked tenderness. To Captain Thornton she was kind, perfectly kind, but that she found him rather dull was evident. It might have been Mollie with whom she had spent all those hours in the dream-garden.
“Must you really go, dear?” she asked.
Mollie said that she was afraid they must. She had heard from her aunt, who was waiting to take them in, and, owing to all Vera’s kindness, Clive was now quite strong again. Vera did not insist.
“I’ve so loved getting to know you!” she said, holding Mollie’s hand at the door of the motor on the morning of their departure. “It’s been such a pleasure. You must often, often come to Compton Dally again. Good-bye, dear!”
But Mollie knew, and Vera knew that she knew, that never again would they be asked to Compton Dally. Meanwhile, if the war isn’t over and Jack hasn’t come back, I’m to go and stay with them next spring on the chicken-farm.