Again that question arrested her, awoke her imaginings, and she made up her mind on what had long been a pondered idea.
She got up at once.
'Nothing whatever,' she said, with a resumption of her usual manner. 'Now I am going. Take care of yourself, papa darling, and wake this sleepy old county up. I adore its sleepiness myself, and I know you can never rouse it, otherwise I should not suggest it.'
The carriage was waiting for her, and she got briskly in.
'Mrs. Emsworth's,' she said to the footman.
As she drove there, she tried to stifle thought, for she knew that her design was to confirm or dispel a suspicion that should never have been hers. She was doing a thing which was based on a wrong done to her husband in thought. That she knew, but she combated it by saying to herself.
'What if it is true?'
She found Mrs. Emsworth at home and delighted to see her, and for a little they just interchanged the generalities which, between two people who have not seen each other for some time, are the necessary ushers to real talk. The day was very hot, and Dorothy, catlike, basked and purred in it. There was something rather décolleté about her appearance, and something in her general atmosphere was equally so. She was, in fact, very different, so she struck Amelie, from the woman who told the gardener's son the fairy-story on the dewy lawn at Long Island.
'I am charmed to see you,' she said for the second time, when Amelie was seated; 'and I was furious the other day when you put me off coming to see you at Molesworth. Had you a prim party? If so, it was kind of you. Priggish, prim, and prudish—those are the qualities I dislike—probably,' she added with admirable candour, 'because I do not happen to be fortunate enough to possess them.' She paused a moment; then an idea seemed to strike her. 'And where and how is Bertie?' she asked. 'I haven't set eyes on him for months—not since the party in Long Island, in fact.'
'He said he hadn't seen you since then the other day,' said Amelie.