“Of course I was bitter about it at first,” said Lady Ellington. “Who could help being, when all my plans were upset, and poor Philip Home was suffering too? I was more sorry for him than for anybody else. I had to tell him, you know, and had a terrible interview with him. But I soon saw that since Madge was not in love with him, but with Evelyn, it was a thousand times better that we should all suffer that purely temporary disturbance and worry than that she should be in the dreadfully false position of being married to one man while she was in love with another.”
Gladys purred a rather feline approval.
“How glad dear Madge must have been when you told her how you felt,” she said. “I wish I had been there when you made it up with her. Who is it who says something about the ‘blessings on the falling out which all the more endears’; it must have been quite like that.”
Lady Ellington met this as well as she could, though it was rather awkward.
“Yes, I think Madge will be perfectly happy,” she said, “now she finds that everyone is quite as nice as ever to her.”
“Dear Madge, I never felt different to her,” said Gladys rather imprudently.
Lady Ellington jumped on to this with extraordinary quickness and precision.
“Ah, I am glad to know that,” she said, “because I now also know that Lady Taverner must have simply invented a quantity of things that she said you had said to her about it. I felt sure you could not have been so unkind.”
So the honours on the whole were pretty well divided; each of them saw through the other, and since each determined to write to Madge that night, it was highly likely that Madge would see through them both.
Mr. Osborne proved to be a true prophet, and it was indeed Lady Salmon and Lady Grilse who came back from the river about tea-time. He had the good luck to be in the hall when they returned, and preceded Lady Ellington to the drawing-room, where he threw open the door for her to enter in the manner of a butler, and announced loudly—