"What does she want to write about?"
"Oh, her things, I suppose. What did you say in your wire?"
"I said 'Awfully sorry can't come. Pressing family business.'"
"It is—very. I'm afraid I was rather disagreeable, Arthur."
He looked up at her with a rueful smile as he stirred his coffee. "You're like a cold bath on a freezing morning—stinging but hygienic."
There was a sudden choke in her voice as she answered: "I'd have said and done anything rather than let you go. And if I've ruined your play and your prospects, I can't help it." She walked quickly away to the window and stood there a moment with her back towards him. Then she returned to her place and ate a business-like breakfast.
[CHAPTER XXIII]
FACING THE SITUATION
The gods were laughing at him; so it seemed to Arthur Lisle. They chose to chastise his folly and his sin by ridicule. He whom the catastrophe—the intrigue and the flight—had broken was chosen to break the news of it. He must put on a composed consolatory face, preach fortitude, recommend patience under the inevitable. He was plumped back into his old position of useful cousin, the friend of both husband and wife. Judith was that too. Why should not she carry the tidings? "No, you'll be more sympathetic," she insisted, with the old touch of mockery governing her manner again. "I should tell him too much of the truth most likely." So he must do it. But this useful cousin seemed a very different sort of man from the stricken sufferer, the jealous lover, of overnight. Indeed it was pitiable for the forsaken jealous lover—denied even a departure from the scene of his woes, condemned to dwell in the house so full of her and yet so empty, the butt (so his sensitive fancy imagined) of half the gossip and half the giggles of which to his ears Hilsey Manor was already full. But the forsaken lover must sink himself in the sympathetic kinsman—if he could; must wear his face and speak in his tones. A monstrous hypocrisy! "Bernadette's run away, but, I'm sorry to say, not with me, Godfrey." No, no, that was all wrong—that was the truth. "Bernadette's left you for Oliver Wyse—unprincipled woman and artful villain!" Was that right? Well, 'artful villain' was right enough, surely? Perhaps 'deluded woman' would do for Bernadette. "Brave woman and happy man!" the rude laughter of the gods suggested. "If we'd either of us had half his grit, Godfrey!" All sorts of things impossible to say the gods invented in their high but disconcerting irony.