She showed herself wonderfully bright, lively, charming, not only to her husband, but to Rhoda, so that Minnie raised her eyebrows, and, after making futile guesses as to what could have happened, and as to the reason of Jack Rotherfield’s abrupt disappearance, expressed the opinion that her aunt was too amiable to be able to “keep it up.”
But she was wrong. Day after day passed and still Lady Sarah was sweet-tempered and bright, playful with her husband, amusing with Rhoda and Minnie, and affectionate to Caryl.
Sir Robert was delighted at this new phase of his wife’s character, and congratulated himself, dear, simple man, on the accident which had seemed so terrible at the time, which had given him an opportunity of putting matters on a sound and safe footing.
But Rhoda and Minnie, with their acute feminine perception of character, detected something forced in Lady Sarah’s laughter, something insincere and hollow in her amiability. She chatted with a vivacity which was almost feverish, and her laughter did not, to their keen ears, ring quite true.
And then Rhoda could not help noticing that Lady Sarah became suddenly much more fond of taking walks by herself than formerly, and saw her coming out of a little newspaper shop in the High Street, where it was very unlikely that she would buy either books or stationery.
Rhoda, ashamed of herself for the thought, came nevertheless to the conclusion that Lady Sarah went there to get letters which she could not safely receive at home.
The suspicion was a dreadful one to bear, for if she was right, Rhoda saw that Lady Sarah had not scrupled to break her promise to her husband as soon as it was made.
Rhoda changed her own line of conduct a little, gave up, as much as possible, her share of Sir Robert’s work, in the hope that his wife would take it up. The only result was, however, that, used to Rhoda’s orderly ways, poor Sir Robert soon got into a hopeless muddle with his notes and manuscripts, when he was thus suddenly left once more to his own devices, while Lady Sarah secretly enjoyed his discomfiture.
Rhoda, meanwhile, kept almost entirely to Caryl’s rooms, except when he went out, when she never failed to accompany him. She scarcely ever got a moment to herself, and she had been thus almost confined to the house for a fortnight, when, running down the hill to the pillar-box at the corner to post a letter to one of her sisters, she caught sight of a motor-car turning into a side-road, and asked herself, with a horrible shock of suspicion and surprise, whether it was not that of Jack Rotherfield.
It was dusk, and she knew there was a possibility that she might have been mistaken; but the presence of Jack in the neighbourhood, in spite of his promise and Lady Sarah’s, was only too probable, and much against her own inclination, Rhoda felt obliged to keep a look out for eventualities.