George Stratton and his wife were announced before I had finished dinner, and I went to them not in the best of humour. I was tired, and the day’s events had been disturbing, and I had been looking forward to a quiet dispassionate review of the whole matter. It was an evening of unusual charm too, and I am devoted to the garden in the dusk when there is only enough wind to carry the scent of flowers and not enough to disperse it. Such evenings are memorable and precious by their very infrequency and I have always grieved when one has been wasted.
Doctors, however, being more naturally, and, I suppose, even wilfully, at the mercy of other people than anyone else is, I laid aside my napkin with a sigh of surrender and once again prepared for duty.
I thought that George looked a little awkward, and I hastened to put him partly at his ease with a cigar. Mrs. George, who was clearly on the warpath, was not to be pacified so simply. Women aren’t. Even with the spread of the tobacco habit they cannot be bought, as a man and brother can, by a Corona Corona; while a whisky-and-soda is powerless, at any rate with the Milly Strattons of this earth.
She came to the point at once. “You must excuse such an informal and probably inconvenient call,” she said, “but we have to leave by an early train and I want to get everything settled. How soon will Rose be ready?”
“Ready?” I said. “For what?”
“To come to us,” she replied. “You surely don’t, on consideration, propose to fall in with my poor brother’s very curious idea of keeping his child from her own kith and kin?”
“I don’t see that I have any way out of it,” I said. “The terms of the will were that I was to be Rose’s guardian unless I had an insuperable objection; in which case she was to go to you. But although I am aware that her presence here will cause certain readjustments and that possibly the child might be happier where there were more young companions, I have no objection that for a moment could be called insuperable. Besides, your brother was a friend of mine whom I knew pretty well—possibly, through our contiguity, even better than you—and it was his wish.”
“His wish!” Mrs. Stratton echoed contemptuously. “And how capable was he, do you consider, of making a sensible wish? At any time, but particularly when he was so ill?”
“The will sounded sensible enough to me,” I said. “It has not been contested. What do you think, Stratton?”
But Stratton was not there to talk. It was the grey mare’s evening out and he was silenced almost before he had completed the preliminary stages of lip-opening.