“Is it possible she doesn’t know it?” I asked Cantyre the next time I saw him.
“Of course she doesn’t. That would be the last thing Coningsby would tell her. We never speak of these things outside the club. If a fellow likes to do it himself—well, that’s his own affair.”
But early in October I came face to face with it all.
I was standing at one of the upper windows, looking down into Blankney Place, when I saw a motor drive up to the door. I knew it was Mrs. Grace’s motor, having seen it a number of times already. When the footman held open the door Mrs. Grace herself stepped out, to be followed by Miss Coningsby, who in turn was followed by....
I strolled away from the window into the interior of the house. I was not so much calm as numb. There were details about which I had to speak to Mrs. Grace, but they all went out of my mind. They went out of my mind as matters with which I had no more concern. A dying man might feel that way about the earthly things he is leaving behind. I was, in fact, not so much like a dying man as like a man who in the full flush of vigor is told that he must in a few minutes face the firing-squad.
So I stood doing nothing, thinking nothing, while I listened to the three voices as they floated up, first from the lower floor, then from the stairway, then from the floor on which I was waiting in this seeming nervelessness.
They drifted nearer—Mrs. Grace’s gentle tones, Elsie Coningsby’s silvery tinkle, and then the rich mezzo, which by association of ideas seemed to shed round me a rose-colored light.
Mrs. Grace and Miss Coningsby came in together, the one in black, the other in white. Both bade me a friendly, impersonal good morning, while Mrs. Grace proceeded at once to the question of rugs. Didn’t I think that good serviceable American rugs, with some of those nice Oriental druggets people used in summer cottages, would be better than anything more fragile and expensive?
I made such answers as I could, keeping my eyes on the door. Presently she appeared on the threshold, looking about with interest and curiosity in her great, dark eyes. Of the minute I retain no more than a vision in rough green English tweed, with a goldish-greenish motoring-veil round the head like a nimbus. She impressed me as at once more delicate and more strong than I remembered her—eager, alert, independent.
“This is to be the men’s smoking-room,” Miss Coningsby explained.