Impossible to divine in this plump, dowdy, fading, dumb creature the participator in all those chatterings and gigglings of a few moments earlier! Nevertheless Edwin, who knew her profoundly, could see beneath the glaze of those eyes the commonsense soul of the sagacious woman protesting against Ingpen's affected manners and deciding that she did not care for Ingpen at all.
"Auntie Hamps is being naughty again," said Hilda bluntly.
Ingpen, and then Edwin, sniggered.
"I can't do anything with her, Edwin," said Maggie, speaking quickly and eagerly, as she and Hilda sat down. "She's bound to let herself in for another attack if she doesn't take care of herself. And she won't take care of herself. She won't listen to the doctor or anybody else. She's always on her feet, and she's got sewing-meetings on the brain just now. I've got her to bed early to-night--she's frightfully shaky--and I thought I'd come up and tell you. You're the only one that can do anything with her at all, and you really must come and see her to-morrow on your way to the works."
Maggie spoke as though she had been urging Edwin for months to take the urgent matter in hand and was now arrived at desperation.
"All right! All right!" said he, with amiable impatience; it was the first he had heard of the matter. "I'll drop in. But I've got no influence over her," he added, with sincerity.
"Oh yes, you have!" said Maggie, mildly now. "I'm very sorry to hear about George's eyes. Seeing it's absolutely necessary for Hilda to take him to London to-morrow, and you've got no servants at all, can't you come and sleep at Auntie's for a night or two? You've no idea what a relief it would be to me."
In an instant Edwin saw that he was beaten, that Hilda and Maggie, in the intervals of their giggling, had combined to overthrow him. The tone in which Maggie uttered the words 'George's eyes,' 'absolutely necessary' and 'such a relief' precluded argument. His wife would have her capricious unnecessary way, and he would be turned out of his own house.
"I think you might, dear," said Hilda, with the angelic persuasiveness of a loving and submissive wife. Nobody could have guessed from that marvellous tone that she had been determined to defeat him and was then, so to speak, standing over his prostrate form.
Maggie, having said what was necessary to be said, fell back into the constraint from which no efforts of her companions could extricate her. Such was the effect upon her of the presence of Tertius Ingpen, a stranger. Presently Ingpen was scanning time-tables for Hilda, and George was finding notepaper for her, and Maggie was running up and down stairs for her. She was off to London. "In that woman's head," thought Edwin, as, observing his wife, he tried in vain to penetrate the secrets behind her demeanour, "there's only room for one idea at a time."