Ethel said nothing. Her color had returned, but I thought she looked bewildered and confused. The doctor turned to me, explanatory. “She’s afraid that she might not consent to go without a fuss, that we might get a crowd round the house if we had to turn her out.”
“Yes, oh yes, I’m sure we should. And I couldn’t stand it. I can’t stand any more. I can’t stand any more!” Ethel cried hysterically, and slipped past me round the corner of the house.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “The sooner all this is over the better it will be for Ethel—about at the end of her tether.”
He took me by the arm. I wished him anywhere else except with me. Never had I liked him less or distrusted him more. I was still feeling the awkwardness of my unfortunate intrusion, uncomfortable, half apologetic, wholly angry and disturbed, but he, not only had he hidden his feelings—I began to wonder whether he had any feelings to hide. A rock, Ethel had called him, an iceberg rather. And like an iceberg, God alone knew what lay hidden away below; God and perhaps some poor devil of a steamer that strikes the cruel projections unawares! He went on talking to me. What did I think of Mrs. Kenley? He would feel happier about Ethel now that she was here. I barely heard him. But I did hear him saying again. “We must get rid of her, there isn’t any risk,” and then poor drunken cook, standing at the bottom of the stairs, nodding her head grotesquely, her greasy wisp of hair waving to and fro, “I knows what I knows, Dr. Wallace.”
The gong sounded for tea. We had it on the lawn under the cedar. Ethel poured. Ralph never spoke a word, throughout the meal, and for once Margaret was quiet. Mrs. Kenley and the doctor did the talking and made the conversation. They played catch with it, and Janet—Mrs. Kenley—was as good at the game as he was. Lightning work they made of it—vivid—and Kenneth represented the thunder—he glowered. And I felt like an invalid does when some friendly “mean well” stays too long. I wished them both—forgive me, Janet, but I really did—in, well, say anywhere. It was a ghastly meal—a meal to choke on.
The Tundish relieved us of his presence as soon as tea was over. The rest of us sat on, but the Ethel-Kenneth rupture still cast its gloom, and I think we all felt that Mrs. Kenley had been a godsend. She was telling us of some of the golf courses she had played on in South Africa, idly prodding the turf with the point of her parasol, when she suddenly bent forward, peered closely at the grass, then straightened herself, holding a tiny glittering fragment between finger and thumb.
She examined it carefully. “Any one lost a diamond?”
Margaret, who had sat so listlessly inert that I had glanced at her curiously more than once, sprang to her feet. “It’s mine,” she cried. “It’s mine, I lost it some time this morning and have been searching for it everywhere.”
“But what an extraordinary piece of luck to find it out here like that,” Ralph remarked; “you might have gone over the lawn with a tooth-comb a hundred times and not have found it.”
“Yes, but remember where I come from,” Mrs. Kenley laughed.