Presently Caroline came to her, her soft eyes full of trouble. "My darling!" she said tenderly, sitting down by her.
"You needn't say it," she said quickly. "If he's like that I'm not going to make a scene. Pretend to talk to me, and presently I'll go and talk to the others."
She had an ardent wish to throw it all off from her, not to care, and to show that she didn't care. But her knees were trembling again, and she could not have walked across the room.
Caroline was near tears. "Oh, it's wicked—the way he has treated you," she said. "You're going to forget him, aren't you, my darling B?"
"Of course I am," said Beatrix, hurriedly. "I'll think no more of him at all. I've got you—and Daddy—and the Dragon."
The mention of Miss Waterhouse may have been drawn from her by the approach of that lady, though she had been all the mother to her that she had ever known and she did feel at that moment that there was consolation in her love.
Miss Waterhouse did not allow her tenderness to overcome her authority, though her tenderness was apparent as she said: "Darling B, you won't be feeling well. I have asked Ella to send for the car, and I shall take you home. We will go quietly upstairs, now, before the men come in."
Beatrix protested. She was perfectly all right, and didn't want any fuss made about her. She was rather impatient, and burning to show that she didn't care. But as most of the people towards whom she would have to make the exhibition wouldn't know that she had any reason to care, it seemed hardly worth the expenditure of energy, of which, at that moment, she had none too much to spare. Also she did care, and the thought of getting away quietly and being herself, in whatever guise her feelings might prompt, was immensely soothing. So she and Miss Waterhouse slipped out of the room, and by the time the men came into it were on their way home.
It was Caroline who told her father. She had a little dreaded his first word and look. In some ways, over this affair of Beatrix's, he had not been quite as she had learnt to know him. He had lost that complete mastery which long years of unfailing kindness and gentleness had given him over his children. He had shown annoyance and resentment, and had made complaints, which one who is firmly in authority does not do. Some weakness, under the stress of feeling, had come out in him, instead of the equable strength which his children had learnt to rely on. Perhaps Caroline loved him all the more for it, for it was to her he had come more than to any other for sympathy and support. But she did not want to have to make any further readjustments. Which of the mixed and opposing feelings would he show first, on the news being broken to him—the great relief it would bring to himself, or the sympathy he would certainly feel towards his child who had been hurt.
"Daddy darling," she said, drawing him a little aside, "B and the Dragon have gone home. She heard at dinner that Lassigny is going to be married. She's all right, but the Dragon made her go home."