Mrs. Owen was nothing if not simple.
“No,” she said.
Canon Alington put on his coat.
“You can give me ten minutes?” he asked. “We can never forget, Agnes and I, the service you did us about those dreadful Nelson letters. And if people do one a service one turns to them again. So I consult you; I turn to you. Why has Hugh come back like this? Why has he left his wife in Davos? Mrs. Owen, is she at Davos?”
It is one of the sad things of life, as the poet Gray has remarked, that so many flowers blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air. But it is much sadder to think how many flowers of humour do the same, owing to the lack of that subtle quality in the audience. Mrs. Owen saw nothing in the least humorous in the fact that she and Canon Alington (and Agnes) had, on the bare fact of Hugh’s return, built a whole tragedy. She had no conception how ludicrous she and her pompous companion were being, she only thought they were striving to be helpful. It never entered her head even that she was following this up with a sort of ghoulish gusto for scandal, nor that, if their surmises proved to be completely unwarranted, she would heave a sigh of relief, and in reality be much disappointed. Instead of realising this, she only clasped her hands together and turned her eyes upward.
“I will sacrifice all day if I can help in this dreadful business,” she said, tacitly answering Canon Alington’s question, and feeling already quite sure that Mrs. Grainger was no longer at Davos. She remembered, too, the position of Davos on the map of Europe; it was not so very far from the Italian lakes, where all sorts of dreadful things constantly occurred.
For one fleeting moment some glimmering of common sense flashed across Canon Alington.
“Do you think we are drawing conclusions from insufficient data?” he asked.
Such a thought had never entered Mrs. Owen’s head. She said so.
“Then there is but one thing to be done,” said Canon Alington, “and that is to go straight to poor Hugh and put ourselves at his disposal, to help in any way we can. Perhaps if we convince him that that is our only object he will tell us what this all means. It may be only a passing misunderstanding, in which case he ought to go back to his wife at once. It may be worse than that. But, whoever is the culprit, we are agreed on our sole purpose, to help.”