“Yes, she came up the basement stairs as I came down just now.”
“Oh, did you tell her about Ethel’s tea?”
“No, I thought you had been up to the top landing to tell her that.”
“I did but she wasn’t in her room. I’ll just run in and tell her and then come back to you. I do so want a quiet talk with some one sensible and sane.”
She hurried back to the house and I opened a couple of deck-chairs and sat down to await her return. How I wanted an opportunity for an hour’s quiet thought! But the heat and the midges were terrible. They were all-pervading; they swamped thought and everything else.
There must be, I thought, some pernicious influence at work. On my previous visits I had always been impressed with the calm and ordered life at Dalehouse. I had enjoyed sitting out in this lovely sheltered garden after dinner with Hanson, pipes going, conversation natural and unlabored, while the light faded away, to leave the great cathedral silhouetted in black against the sky. The cathedral still towered up above the garden wall but that was all of calm and peace that remained.
Even before the awful discovery of Stella’s death I had sensed an uncomfortable restraint in the air; and now every little incident and every simple conversation seemed fraught with some hidden meaning and double purpose. I could not even accept Margaret’s simple assertion that she had lost a sixpenny bit on the stairs without wondering why she should have been handling money on the way to speak to Annie. Could she have pulled it out with her handkerchief? I began to ponder on how and where girls carried them. I found that I was very vague about it, but I had a general impression that pockets no longer existed and that even if they carried purses at all, they did not have to extract them when a handkerchief was required. What did they do with their money? No, it somehow did not seem natural and reasonable that she should have dropped a sixpence on those stairs, but why she should lie to me about it, or for what else she could have been looking so urgently if she had lied, I could not guess.
Thinking over our conversation, I found that I could not remember whether she told me she had actually given Annie her message or not, but I most certainly had the impression that Annie was up-stairs in her room, or why should I have been so surprised when I ran into her a moment later at the top of the basement stairs?
Margaret came and sat down in the deck-chair beside me. She had brought out a red parasol with her, and as she lay back in her chair, it heightened the rosy color in her pink and white cheeks, and tinted her golden hair a ruddy bronze. She heaved a little sigh of satisfaction as she settled down against the cushions. Rather like a cat she was, I thought, where cushions and comfort were concerned—she made a luxury of them.
“I wonder how long this is going to last,” she said pensively, and then after a pause, “You know, I have a sort of feeling that it’s this awful heat that is making things so terrible. It gives to everything a feverish unnatural kind of air. I am so glad to hear they’re having prayers for rain in the cathedral.”