“As a matter of fact, sir,” he said, “the only thing he asked was whether Mrs. Leicester’s mother was any better.”
“It’s very odd,” Dudley Leicester answered. And with Saunders splashing the water in the white bath-cabinet, with a touch of sun lighting up the two white rooms—in the midst of these homely and familiar sounds and reflections, fear suddenly seized Dudley Leicester. His wife’s letter frightened him; when there fell from it a bracelet, he started as he had never in his life started at a stumble of his horse. He imagined that it was a sort of symbol, a sending back of his gifts. And even when he had read her large, sparse words, and discovered that the curb chain of the bracelet was broken, and Pauline desired him to take it to the jeweller’s to be repaired—even then the momentary relief gave way to a host of other fears. For Dudley Leicester had entered into a world of dread.
II
HE appeared to have become friendless and utterly solitary. Even his man Saunders, to whom he had been attached as he had been attached to his comfortable furniture and his comfortable boots, seemed to him now to be grown reserved, frigid, disapproving. He imagined that Saunders had a threatening aspect. Fear suddenly possessed his heart when he perceived, seated in the breakfast-room, well forward in a deep saddle-bag chair, with Peter the dachshund between his speckless boots, Robert Grimshaw.
“What have you come for?” Leicester asked; “what’s it about?”
Robert Grimshaw raised his dark, seal-like eyes, and Leicester seemed to read in them reproof, judgment, condemnation.
“To leave Peter with the excellent Saunders,” Robert Grimshaw said; “I can’t take him to Athens.”
“Oh, you’re going to Athens?” Dudley Leicester said, and oddly it came into his mind that he was glad Grimshaw was going to Athens. He wanted Grimshaw not to hear of his disgrace.
For although Grimshaw had frequently spoken dispassionately of unfaithful husbands—dispassionately, as if he were registering facts that are neither here nor there, facts that are the mere inevitabilities of life, he had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that Grimshaw would condemn him.
“I start at one, you know,” Grimshaw said. “You’re not looking very bright.”