"Well, dear," said Charlotte, "now you have finished your lecture, I will go downstairs. I suppose you think, as you are—are married, you may——"
Charlotte's ready tears began to flow, and Joyce, losing her patience, passed by her quickly, and ran down into the hall.
It was hard to bid them all "good-bye," her baby smiling at her from under her warm hood, Lettice and Lota clinging to her, and Susan looking back to the last moment, as she led the way down Great George Street with Joy in her arms.
"You must give Uncle Piers my love, you know," Joyce said, "and say I am coming to-morrow. Good-bye; good-bye."
She stood at the door watching her husband and children down the street, which opens into Park Street, kissing her hand to them as the little girls' figures disappeared round the corner.
Lord Maythorne and Charlotte were rather longer in setting out, and a great deal of hesitation on Charlotte's part, and coaxing on Lord Maythorne's, was necessary, before they too at last departed. Charlotte leaning on Lord Maythorne's arm, and walking as if at every step she expected to meet a rioter, or have a stone thrown at her!
But Great George Street was as quiet as any deserted city, and the large, respectable houses looked as if they, at least, and their inhabitants, stood aloof from all questions of dispute, and all stormy expressions of opinion.
Joyce was an object of some interest to an old lady who lived opposite, and she craned her neck over the blind in the dining-room to see if it were actually true that only Joyce and Falcon were left in the house with Mrs. Arundel.
Joyce, always sensible, and with "her wits about her," as her mother often said, now closed and bolted the front door, and closed the shutters in the hall and the dining-room.
Then she went to the door leading to the garden, called the gardener, who, in spite of the tumult below, went on sweeping the fallen leaves together in a heap, as if it were the one great business of life.