His cases had not long detained him, and it was still not long after noon when the cob, still pleased and alert with motion, but with smoking flanks, drew up at his door. The clear chill of the morning had altogether passed, and the air in the basin or tea-cup of a town was still and sultry. There was a familiar hat on the table in the hall, a bunch of long-stemmed tawny chrysanthemums lay by it. And at that sight some distant echo of barbaric and simple man, deplorable to the smoothness of civilization and altogether obsolete, was resonant in him. He pitched the chrysanthemums into the street, where they flew like a shooting star close by the head of General Fortescue, who was tottering down to the club, and slammed the door. It was melodramatic and foolish enough, but the desire that prompted it was quite sincere and irresistible, and if at the moment Major Ames had been in that cool oak-panelled hall, there is little doubt that Dr. Evans would have done his best to pitch him out after his flowers.
The doctor gave himself a moment to recover from his superficial violence, and then went out into the garden. They were sitting together on the bench under the mulberry-tree, and Major Ames got up with his usual briskness as he approached. Somehow Dr. Evans felt as if he was being welcomed and made to feel at home.
“Good morning,” said Major Ames. “Glorious day, isn’t it? I just stepped over with a handful of flowers, and we’ve been having a bit of a chat, a bit of a chat.”
“Cousin Lyndhurst has very kindly come to talk over all these little disturbances,” said Millie.
She looked at him.
“Shall I explain?” she asked.
Dr. Evans took the seat that Major Ames had vacated, leaving him free to sit down in a garden chair opposite, or to stand, just as he pleased.
“It is like this, Wilfred,” she said. “Cousin Amy did not like my joining the anti-Suffragette league which Mrs. Altham started, and I have told Lyndhurst that I did not care a straw one way or the other, except that I could not go to prison to please Cousin Amy or any one else. But it looked like taking sides, she thought. So Lyndhurst thought it would make everything easy if I didn’t join any league at all. I think it very clever and tactful of him to think of that, and I will certainly tell Mrs. Altham I find I am too busy. Of course, there is no quarrel between Cousin Amy and me, and Lyndhurst wants to assure us that he isn’t mixed up in it, though there isn’t any—and, of course, if Cousin Amy didn’t see me the other day when I thought she pretended not to, it makes a difference.”
Millie delivered herself of these lucid statements with her usual deferential air.
“I think it is very kind of Cousin Lyndhurst to take so much trouble,” she added. “He is stopping to lunch.”