§2
The morning dawned at last when the surprise was ripe. It was four days after Susan’s visit, and she was due again on the morrow with the money that would enable her employer to go to Lady Viping’s now imminent dinner. Lady Harman had had to cut the Social Friends’ meeting altogether, but the day before the surprise Agatha Alimony had come to tea in her jobbed car, and they had gone together to the committee meeting of the Shakespear Dinner Society. Sir Isaac had ignored that defiance, and it was an unusually confident and quite unsuspicious woman who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual tweeds and gaiters,—buttoned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,—unusually a-straddle, on the hearthrug.
“That’s enough, Snagsby,” said Sir Isaac, at her entrance. “Bring it all.”
She met Snagsby’s eye, and it was portentous.
Latterly Snagsby’s eye had lost the assurance of his former days. She had noted it before, she noted it now more than ever; as though he was losing confidence, as though he was beginning to doubt, as though the world he had once seemed to rule grew insecure beneath his feet. For a moment she met his eye; it might have been a warning he conveyed, it might have been an appeal for sympathy, and then he had gone. She looked at the table. Sir Isaac had breakfasted acutely.
In silence, among the wreckage and with a certain wonder growing, Lady Harman attended to her needs.
Sir Isaac cleared his throat.
She became aware that he had spoken. “What did you say, Isaac?” she asked, looking up. He seemed to have widened his straddle almost dangerously, and he spoke with a certain conscious forcefulness.
“We’re going to move out of this house, Elly,” he said. “We’re going down into the country right away.”
She sat back in her chair and regarded his pinched and determined visage.