‘A car?’
Mrs. Luke got up quickly. So did he. She turned on the light, and it shone on their pale faces staring at each other. He hadn’t remembered the car till that moment.
Then without a word she went into the passage, snatched up a coat, wrapped it round herself, and before he could speak was out of the house. ‘Wait there,’ she called over her shoulder, ‘wait there—she might come——’
A car. Whose car but Edgar’s? Had Edgar——? Was Edgar——?
No, no. Impossible. She had arrived alone at her father’s, and the car had left her there.
But Edgar must know—he could tell her....
§
The butler hadn’t wanted to let her in, seeing her looking so wild on the steps when he answered the ring, and no hat on, and an old coat pulled round her shoulders, and he well knowing the affair with his master was off; but what did she care for butlers? She simply pushed past him, and went straight to the library—the handsome, Turkey-carpeted, leathery library she so vividly remembered—and there, as she expected, sat Mr. Thorpe.
He was in a deep chair before a great wood fire, with beside him, on a little Moorish table, his coffee and his liqueur, in his hands the evening paper, and in his mouth a huge cigar. He didn’t look in the least unhappy, nor did he look in the least as if he were still angry. On the contrary, he looked contented and pleased. But this expression changed when, turning his head on hearing the door open, he saw Mrs. Luke.
‘Edgar,’ she said, coming quickly across to him, holding Jocelyn’s coat together at her neck with shaking fingers, ‘where is Salvatia?’