“Presumably she knows—mother will have told her. She got twice or three times into the nursing home. Presumably she is awaiting developments.”
“What a horrid woman!” And Dolly, who had recovered, cried, “Why, she may be coming down to turn us out now!”
Charles put her right. “I wish she would,” he said ominously. “I could then deal with her.”
“So could I,” echoed his father, who was feeling rather in the cold. Charles had been kind in undertaking the funeral arrangements and in telling him to eat his breakfast, but the boy as he grew up was a little dictatorial, and assumed the post of chairman too readily. “I could deal with her, if she comes, but she won’t come. You’re all a bit hard on Miss Schlegel.”
“That Paul business was pretty scandalous, though.”
“I want no more of the Paul business, Charles, as I said at the time, and besides, it is quite apart from this business. Margaret Schlegel has been officious and tiresome during this terrible week, and we have all suffered under her, but upon my soul she’s honest. She’s not in collusion with the matron. I’m absolutely certain of it. Nor was she with the doctor. I’m equally certain of that. She did not hide anything from us, for up to that very afternoon she was as ignorant as we are. She, like ourselves, was a dupe—” He stopped for a moment. “You see, Charles, in her terrible pain your poor mother put us all in false positions. Paul would not have left England, you would not have gone to Italy, nor Evie and I into Yorkshire, if only we had known. Well, Miss Schlegel’s position has been equally false. Take all in all, she has not come out of it badly.”
Evie said: “But those chrysanthemums—”
“Or coming down to the funeral at all—” echoed Dolly.
“Why shouldn’t she come down? She had the right to, and she stood far back among the Hilton women. The flowers—certainly we should not have sent such flowers, but they may have seemed the right thing to her, Evie, and for all you know they may be the custom in Germany.”
“Oh, I forget she isn’t really English,” cried Evie. “That would explain a lot.”