She nodded, and repeated, 'Don't wait.'
His answer to that was to turn not only a bored but a slightly injured face towards the woman who had, not without difficulty, balanced her rotund form on the bench at the far end. She might have been the comfortable wife of a rural grocer. She spoke the good English you may not infrequently hear among that class, but it became clear, as she went on, that she was a person of a wider cultivation.
'You'd better go. She'll be stodgy and dull.' Vida spoke with a real sympathy for her friend's sufferings. 'Oh, portentous dull.'
'And no waist!' sighed Borrodaile, but he sank back in his corner.
Presently his wandering eye discovered something in his companion's aspect that told him subtly she was not listening to the mauve matron. Neither were some of the others. A number had moved away, and the little lane their going left was not yet closed, for the whole general attention was obviously slackened. This woman wasn't interesting enough even to boo at. The people who didn't go home began to talk to one another. But in Vida's face—what had brought to it that still intensity? Borrodaile moved so that he could follow the fixed look. One of the infrequently passing hansoms had stopped. Was she looking at that? Two laughing people leaning out, straining to catch what the mauve orator was saying. Suddenly Borrodaile pulled his slack figure together.
'Sophia!' he ejaculated softly, 'and Stonor!—by the beard of the prophet!' He half rose, whether more annoyed or amazed it would be hard to tell. 'We're discovered!' he said, in a laughing whisper. As he turned to add 'The murder's out,' he saw that Vida had quietly averted her face. She was leaning her head on her hand, so that it masked her features. Even if the woman who was speaking had not been the object of such interest as the people in the hansom had to bestow, even had either of them looked towards Vida's corner, only a hat and a gauze ruffle would have been seen.
Borrodaile took the hint. His waning sense of the humour of the situation revived.
'Perhaps, after all, if we lay low,' he said, smiling more broadly. 'It would be nuts for Stonor to catch us sitting at the feet of Mrs. Thomas.' He positively chuckled at the absurdity of the situation. He had slipped back into his corner, but he couldn't help craning his neck to watch those two leaning over the door of the hansom, while they discussed some point with animation. Several times the man raised his hand as if to give an order through the trap door. Each time Sophia laughingly arrested him. 'He wants to go on,' reported Borrodaile, sympathetically. 'She wants him to wait a minute. Now he's jumped out. What's he—looking for another hansom? No—now she's out. Bless me, she's shaking hands with him. He's back in the hansom!—driving away. Sophia's actually—— 'Pon my soul, I don't know what's come over the women! I'm rather relieved on the whole.' He turned round and spoke into Vida's ear. 'I've been a little sorry for Sophia. She's never had the smallest interest in any man but that cousin of hers—and, of course, it's quite hopeless.'
Vida sat perfectly motionless, back to the speaker, back to the disappearing hansom, staring at the parapet.