"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than you do."
"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting hand.
"What does all that matter—if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"
He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"
Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set the police after her——!"
"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.
As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she moved back to the sofa without a word.
On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.
Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his wife.