It was the sound of the servant’s step on the stairs and the ominous rattle of the dinner things which finally checked her tears; she was not going to be caught crying, and hastily beat a retreat into her bedroom.
“If they see me like this they will imagine Ralph is unkind to me!” she thought, shocked at her own reflection in the looking-glass. “Oh dear, how I wish he were at home! And yet I don’t, for if he were here just now I know I couldn’t resist telling him everything, and that would worry him; and he shall not be worried just now when he is so specially busy studying ‘Hamlet.’”
Macneillie returning from the theatre soon after, could not but observe at their tête à tête dinner that his companion had been crying, but like the sensible man he was he affected utter blindness and did the lion’s share of the talking.
“Can you spare me a little time this afternoon,” he said as he rose from the table. “I want to drive over to a village about three miles from here, the day is so bright I don’t think you would take cold.”
Evereld gladly assented, and Macneillie, who as an old traveller was an adept at making people comfortable with rugs and cushions, tucked her comfortably into the best open carriage he had been able to secure and was glad to see that the fresh air soon brought back the colour to her face and the light to her eyes.
“You and I have both had a dull morning. I have been bored to death with people incessantly wanting to speak to me, and you I suppose have been bored by being too much alone.”
“No,” she said, “I have not been much alone; Mrs. Brinton came to me first, and after she had gone Ivy came. They both of them vexed me somehow, but I think it was my own fault.”
Macneillie meditated for a few minutes. He had not studied character all these years for nothing, and Evereld’s transparent honesty and straightforwardness made her easy reading. Myra he had known for a long time both before her engagement and since her marriage; she was a much more complex character, but he understood her thoroughly and had noted, though she little guessed it, that she was jealous both of Evereld’s happiness and of Ivy’s success in her profession: moreover he was not without a shrewd suspicion that she was just a little bit in love with Ralph herself.
“Life is never altogether easy when a great number of people are going about the world together,” he said. “There are sure to be little rubs. If you have ever seen anything of military life you will understand that. The officers’ wives and families are pretty sure to have their quarrels and little differences now and then, but in the main there is a certain loyalty that binds them together. It is just the same with us. I have known people not on speaking terms for weeks, but they generally have a good-natured reconciliation before the end of the tour.”
“Yes,” said Evereld, “I can quite fancy that. And I know if I hadn’t been horrid and suspicious things would have been different this morning. Please don’t say anything about it to Ralph, I don’t want him to know that I had been crying.”