Diana wrenched her hand away. “I know you mean to be kind, but you mustn’t talk like that. I’m tired, and silly, and I’ve made you think all sorts of nonsense. Please, please forget it—and don’t let’s ever speak about it again.”
Her voice broke once more, and she hurried upstairs, leaving Rose staring blankly after her.
XI
The wedding duly took place in June.
Ford and Diana went to the Channel Islands, and Lady Aviolet, in a quiet, relentless manner, began to urge upon Rose once more the question of school for Cecil.
“He’s improving very much in every way, under Miss Wade, but it’s time he saw something of other boys. It is such a handicap to be an only child. I don’t say it’s urgent—but I do say, go and look at various places. There’s Hurst, now——”
It was not Lady Aviolet’s arguments that prevailed upon Rose at last, but the recollection of her conversation in London with Charlesbury, and—still more—a renewal of nursery tragedy.
Rose, persisting in a habit that was silently, but intensely, disapproved of by Miss Wade, and entering the nursery unexpectedly, discovered the governess in fits of spasmodic laughter before a paper that she held in her hand.
Cecil, his back turned to her, appeared to be absorbed in gazing out of the window. He did not turn round at his mother’s entrance. Rose’s intuition, far more developed than her reasoning powers, warned her of tension in the atmosphere.
“What’s up?”