“Tell your aunt we’re dining here,” he suggested.
She laughed aloud.
“Wouldn’t it be fun,” she speculated, and Allison led her in to the phone. She turned to him with a snap in her eyes at the door of the booth. “It depends on who answers.”
CHAPTER III
THE CHANGE IN THE RECTOR’S EYES
The grand privilege of Mrs. Jim Sargent’s happy life was to worry all she liked. She began with the rise of the sun, and worried about the silver chest; whether it had been locked over night. Usually she slipped downstairs, in the grey of the morning, to see, and, thus happily started on the day, she worried about breakfast and luncheon and dinner; and Jim and her sister and her niece, Lucile; and the servants and the horses and the flowers; and at nights she lay awake and heard burglars. Just now, as she sat on the seven chairs and the four benches of the mahogany panelled library, amid a wealth of serious-minded sculpture and painting and rare old prints, she was bathed in a new ecstasy of painful enjoyment. She was worried about Gail! It was six-thirty now, and Gail had not yet returned from Lucile’s.
At irregular intervals, say first two minutes and then three and a half, and then one, she walked into the Louis XIV reception parlour, and made up her mind to have a new jeweller try his hand at the sun-ray clock, and looked out of the windows to see if Lucile’s car was arriving. Between times she pursued her favourite literary diversion; reading the automobile accidents in the evening papers. She had spent all her later years in looking for Jim’s name among the list of the maimed!
Mrs. Helen Davies, dressed for dinner with as much care as if she had been about to attend one of the unattainable Mrs. Waverly-Gaites’ annuals, came sweeping down the marble stairs with the calm aplomb of one whom nothing can disturb, and, lorgnette in hand, turned into the library without even a glance into the floor-length mirror in the hall. Her amber beaded gown was set perfectly on her fine shoulders, and her black hair, fashionably streaked with grey, was properly done, as she was perfectly aware.
“I’m so glad you came down, Helen!” breathed Mrs. Sargent, with a sigh of relief. “I’m so worried!”
“Naturally, Grace,” returned her sister Helen, who was reputed to be gifted in repartee. “One would be, under the circumstances. What are they?” and she tapped her chin delicately with the tip of her lorgnette, as a warning to an insipient yawn. It was no longer good form to be bored.
“Gail!” replied Mrs. Sargent, who was inclined to dumpiness and a decided contrast to her stately widowed sister. “She hasn’t come home from Lucile’s!”