"It wasn't that," Esther observed with ample emphasis. Protected by the gloom, she drew nearer to Judith, put her arm round her, and kissed her. "You mustn't mind so much," she whispered. "Men have to take tumbles all the time, and Arthur took his bravely."
"Oh, after the other thing it is such hard luck! And I—we—didn't know how to—to help or console him. I wish Bernadette had been there! She'd have known how to do that."
Esther frowned at the idea of this very desperate remedy. A forlorn silence fell on the car, till they reached home and got out. In the hall Esther laid a hand on Judith's arm.
"Frank will be back by now. Are you equal to facing him?" she asked.
"I'd sooner not, if you don't mind. I shall go to bed."
"Don't fret. Perhaps they will—pull it together, didn't he say?—really!"
Judith shook her head mournfully and trailed off upstairs to bed. The hostess stood watching her guest's progress for a moment with what seemed a rather critical eye, and then went in to her husband's study.
Frank Norton Ward was seated in front of a tray, and was consuming cold beef and claret with an excellent appetite. An open-air meeting at seven, followed by a church bazaar (with "a few words" from the prospective candidate) from eight-thirty till ten, had been his useful, honourable, but exhausting evening.
"Well, here you are!" he greeted his wife cheerfully. "Had a good time, Esther?"
His question opened the gates again to the doleful flood of Esther's impressions. Her husband listened with a smile; to the detached mind a fiasco has always its amusing side, and Norton Ward was by no means particularly concerned about Arthur or his fortunes. He finished his claret and lit his pipe during the sorrowful recital, and at the end of it remarked, "Well, it serves him right, really. That sort of thing won't do him any good—it's not his job—and perhaps now he'll see it. Didn't Judith come in with you?"