Rose gasped in her astonishment. Her husband’s jerked out sentences, his perturbed and bothered look, as much as her sister’s evident agitation, kept her from putting the elucidatory questions which she longed to ask. She could scarcely believe this startling news, so abruptly given; it seemed to her incredible that Paul Hallam should be alive, and coming there. Gently she passed an arm about her sister’s shoulders and spoke to her soothingly.
“You poor dear!” was all she said. “You poor dear!”
Mary came running down the stairs, agog with excitement, and manifestly curious. But at the foot of the stairs she halted abruptly, and surveyed the group in the hall in wide-eyed amaze. Tactfully she disregarded Esmé’s tearful condition and confined her attention to the dilapidations of her attire.
“You’ve been in the wars,” she said. “Come on up to my room; I’ll rig you out.”
Jim Bainbridge, approving of his daughter’s handling of an embarrassing situation, looked after the pair as they went arm in arm up the stairs; then, in answer to the question in his wife’s eyes, he followed her into the sitting-room and entered into explanations.
Rose took things more calmly than he had expected. The shock of the news left her bewildered and curiously at a loss for words. She found some difficulty in collecting her ideas.
“I always said,” she remarked once, “that it was ridiculous to swear so positively to a man’s identity by the clothes he happened to be wearing.”
And after reflection she added simply:
“Poor George!”
Bainbridge’s sympathies set strongly in the same direction.