Bertie read this and re-read it, and for the first time a doubt stood by him, dim and shadowy, but apparent, visible to the senses. This last letter was so like her; it threw into brighter light the unlikeness to her of the affair of the blackmail. Yet there was no other explanation the least plausible.
A week later they were both in London. The Palmers were there also, on the eve of their departure to America—Mrs. Palmer having spent August very pleasantly in about thirty different houses, her husband having spent it very profitably in one. In other words, he had remained the whole month in London, and devoted himself to the consolidation and extension of his English interests. He had been able to go ahead more completely on his own lines, and with his own rapidity, owing to the absence of other directors on their holidays, and, octopus-like, had spread his tentacles far and wide. But now affairs in America demanded his presence, and he was leaving his English business in the hands of Bilton, who appeared to him, the better he knew him, to be extraordinarily efficient. He was almost as rapid, and quite as indefatigable, as Mr. Palmer himself, and had the faculty of being able to absorb himself in one branch of his work from ten to eleven, and to pass without pause into a similar state of absorption over another. Since, then, Seaton House was open, and to open their own house just for a couple of days was unnecessary, Bertie and Amelie took up their quarters there.
Mrs. Emsworth, under Bilton's direction, was to make another American tour this autumn, and was, in fact, in London only for a day or two before she left by the same boat by which the Palmers were also going. She had made an appointment with Bertie for the afternoon of the day after his arrival in London, and since she had warned him that he might expect a hot time, he took with him, in order to equalize the temperature on both sides, the contents of the packet that lived under lock and key in his despatch-box. He had himself no wish to indulge in recrimination; as he had told her, he wanted and entreated her help, but if she was proposing to hurl, so to speak, the returned dressing-bag at his head, the letter seemed to him of the nature of a gun that wanted a great deal of silencing.
She was at home when he arrived, and he was at once shown up into the room he knew so well. The outside blinds were down to keep out the stress of the August heat, and the air was thick with the scent of flowers. Then there came the rustle of a dress on the landing outside, and she entered.
'Are you there, Bertie?' she asked. 'It is so dark one can see nothing.'
She drew up one of the blinds.
'That is better,' she said. 'Now, what do you want?' She gave him no other greeting of hand-shake, but sat down on the sofa opposite the chair where he had been sitting. At the sight of her all his pent-up anger and indignation rushed to the surface; he had not known before how vile what she had done seemed to him.
'What have I done to you that you should treat me like this?' he broke out. 'Once I gave you my heart, myself, all I was, and you laughed at me. Then—oh my God! it is too much.'
She looked at him in blank surprise.
'You got over it,' she said. 'You married somebody else. I think I behaved rather well. If I had chosen I might have made things unpleasant for you. But I am not that sort of woman.'