All, even if he loved her no more. That was the risk she had taken with open eyes, and love her sanely or love her not at all, he had come to Hepplestall’s: Rupert the man was of more importance than Rupert the husband. And the right man would not cease to love her because she had gone crusading for his soul under the banner of a Bradshaw.
She saw that she had come round to optimism and found herself in such a port with a thousand new alarms. She was crying safety when there was no safety, she...
Rupert and William were talking and she had not been listening. She must have missed clews to Rupert’s thought and forced herself to hear. It didn’t sound revealing talk, though. Lightly—and how could they be light?—they were chaffing each other about their cars.
“I’ll prove it to you now,” William was saying. “We’ll garage your crock here and I’ll drive you up to the Hall in a car that is a car.”
“No, thanks,” said Rupert, “I’ve something to do first, with Mary. We’ll follow you soon. I dare say my aunt won’t be sorry to have warning of our coming.”
William’s face fell. Gertrude could make herself unpleasant when she did not get her way, and this time her hopes had gone sadly agley. He would have liked a bodyguard when he announced to her that Rupert was coming to Staithley. “I had hoped—” he began.
Rupert nodded curtly. “Yes,” he said, surprising William by a look which seemed strangely to comprehend his dilemma, “but we shall not be long.”
Mary thrilled through all preoccupation to the heady thought that a Bradshaw was to dine at Staithley Hall, but her way there was not, it seemed, to be an easy one. Rupert chose, she supposed, to have things out with her first, and if she did not relish the anticipation, she could admire his promptitude. He had an air of grim gayety which mystified by its contradiction, but of which the grimness seemed addressed to William and the gayety to her.
“Got any luggage?” he asked her. She had quitted Staithley with a suitcase; she returned with no more outward show of possession, and they picked up her case in the ante-room where she had left it as they passed through to get the car.
“Well, Mary Ellen,” he said, using her full name which certainly was normal in Lancashire where the Mary Ellens and the John Thomases are almost double-barreled names, “this is Staithley. How well do you remember it? Is there a road round the mills?”