'Yes, certainly,' John answered with false glib lightness. 'What about? Some business?'
'Well, yes—business,' drawled Twemlow.
They walked away towards the outer hall, and she heard no more, except the indistinct murmur of a sudden brief dialogue between the visitor and the two girls, who must have come in from the garden. Then the front door banged heavily. He was gone. The vast and arid tedium of her life closed in upon her again; she seemed to exist in a colourless void peopled only by ominous dim elusive shapes of disaster.
But as involuntarily she clenched her hands the formidable thought swept through her brain that Arthur Twemlow was not so calm, nor so impassive, nor so set apart, but that her spell over him, if she chose to exert it, might be a shield to the devious man her husband.
CHAPTER IV
AN INTIMACY
'Does father really mean it about me going to the works to-morrow?' Ethel asked that night.