Mrs. Van Santen, perhaps, showed traces of the emotion which the unpleasant scene of the preceding Sunday had caused her. She was sensible enough, dear old soul, not to disturb the general harmony by any open allusion to the trouble on that occasion, or by any appearance of anxiety about the present. But she did not look quite so peaceful, quite so serene, as she had looked before, and Gerard was quite sure that she was keeping a watchful eye on her card-playing sons, lest any more disturbances should break the peace of her family and her guests.
But underneath all this surface appearance of calm and pleasure Gerard was now conscious that there was a current of anxiety, a subdued unrest, which infected the whole of the Van Santen family, and had spread, perhaps without their being fully aware of it, to their guests.
It was easily explained, of course, by the occurrences of the preceding Sunday, by the inevitable self-consciousness which they had produced in everybody; so that the visitors felt impelled to be more sprightly and more at ease than usual, and the family, on their side, had to keep up an air of having absolutely forgotten the ill-mannered attack made upon one of them by the hasty and impetuous Sir William.
Thus the general atmosphere seemed to be electric, charged with a sort of vague danger, and conducive to excitement and unrest.
When Gerard found himself ousted by Denver, he retreated to the music-room, and there he found Arthur and Cora, no longer at the piano, but conversing with intense seriousness in a corner of the room. He had scarcely entered, when Mrs. Van Santen came in, noiselessly, but wearing a look of unusual excitement in her good old face. She went straight to Cora, said a few words to her in an undertone, and went back again into the next room.
Then Cora spoke to Arthur, and he, after a few minutes’ earnest conversation with her, sauntered across the room to Gerard.
“It seems,” he said, “that the Van Santens are rather surprised to see you here to-day. They had an idea, I think, that you took the part of Sir William Gurdon against them.”
By a rapid process of thought, Gerard knew how this idea had arisen in their minds. He had left the Priory by himself on the preceding Sunday, and had only met Sir William afterwards. As he had expressed no opinion favorable to Sir William’s cause previous to that, but as he had, on the contrary, done his best to persuade the baronet that he had made a mistake, it was clear that Cora’s idea could not be based on what she had then seen and heard.
It was because Denver had followed Sir William, having injured the tire of his car in order to bring him to a standstill, and because he had then discovered Gerard in the baronet’s company, and the family understood him to be on the side of the enemy.
He was careful, however, to give no hint of what he knew to Arthur when he was thus accused of siding with the baronet.