She went downstairs in advance of Prudence, and throughout the reading of the morning prayers her pink distressed face witnessed to its owner’s shame in being a partner to this flagrant deception. She was shielding her sister against her conscience: no accessory to a criminal offence could have felt more wickedly implicated. And Prudence did not care. She was so utterly reckless that she had not bargained even with Miss Matilda for her silence. It had not occurred to Prudence that anyone could be mean enough to inform against her.
With the finish of breakfast Miss Agatha commanded her presence in the morning-room, and provided her with sufficient work to occupy her fully until the lunch hour; and Prudence sat near the open window with her sewing in her lap and looked out on the garden with faintly smiling eyes, recalling the overnight interview while she watched the gardener a few yards off trimming a border of wallflowers which since the previous day had been trampled upon inexplicably.
“It must have been a dog from outside, Simmonds,” Miss Agatha remarked from her position at the window.
Simmonds, stooping over the despoiled border, presented an uncompromising back to her view. He grunted something, of which the only word that Miss Agatha caught was “tramps.”
“In that case,” she said with decision, “it is a matter for the police.”
The smile in Prudence’s eyes deepened, and Miss Matilda’s downbent face took on a brighter shade of pink. There is no end to the embarrassment which follows upon duplicity.
Luncheon brought William and a further sense of enormity. William appeared somewhat obviously not to see his youngest sister; she had become, since answering him with unpardonable rudeness in the drawing-room yesterday, amazingly invisible to him. That he was aware of her presence was manifest by the care with which he avoided looking in her direction, and by the calculated offensiveness of his speech in referring to the absent Steele.
“I am glad to say that bounder Steele left by train this morning,” he announced with unpleasant emphasis, as soon as the usual attention to his buttons, which allowed for a more expansive ease, left him free to indulge in the amenities of the table. “I hope Morgan won’t send a man like that again.”
“Edward Morgan usually comes himself,” Mr Graynor observed. “But for a touch of bronchitis he would have come. He is subject to chest trouble.”
“Well, of course,” said Prudence, with the sisterly intention of annoying William who was senior to Mr Morgan, “he is getting old.”