Hazel was saved the effort of making a crushing repartee, by Pearl, who had been silently eating her lunch, now suddenly launching a remark into the momentary pause.
“Did Uncle Dominick go to the ball?” she asked, raising a pair of limpid blue eyes to Berny’s face.
An instantaneous, significant silence fell on the others, and all eyes turned inquiringly to Berny. Her air of cool control became slightly exaggerated.
“No, he stayed at home with me,” she replied, picking daintily at the meat on her plate.
“But I suppose he felt real hurt and annoyed,” said Hannah. “He couldn’t have helped it.”
Berny did not reply. She knew that she must sooner or later tell her sisters of Dominick’s strange departure. They would find it out otherwise and suspect more than she wanted them to know. They, like the rest of the world, had no idea that Berny’s brilliant marriage was not the domestic success it appeared on the surface. She moved her knife and fork with an arranging hand, and, as Hazel started to speak, said with as careless an air as she could assume,
“Dominick’s gone. He left this morning.”
The news had even more of an effect than she had expected. Her four companions stared at her in wonderment. A return of the dread and depression of the morning came upon her when she saw their surprise. She felt her heart sink as it had done when she read his note.
“Gone where?” exclaimed Hazel. This was the test question and Berny had schooled herself in an answer in the car coming up.
“Oh, up into the country,” she said nonchalantly. “He’s worn out. They work the life out of him in that horrible bank. He’s getting insomnia and thought he’d better take a change now before he got run completely down, so he left this morning and I’m a gay grass widow.”