"Back to the hotel? Of course!--you are ill, my poor dear! You need rest...."
"I mean back home. You see I can't be here now ... when this has happened. I must go now, to-night. I remember the train goes at nine-fifty-five."
Mrs. Heth, wheeling upon the maid with livid perturbation, cried:
"Get my wraps."
XX
In which Jack Dalhousie wears a New Dignity, and the Lame Stranger comes to the House of Heth.
Dalhousie had been worthless while he lived. Now he had achieved the last supreme importance. The inconsiderable of yesterday wore a mute and mighty power. So he reached over the spaces, and broke the brilliant dinner-party at the Café des Ambassadeurs. So Mrs. Heth and Carlisle Heth disputed, by this new great dignity that was his, and talked in the hotel bedroom, and hurriedly changed evening attire for travelling suits. And so Hugo Canning, abruptly widowed at a railway station, was left to toss wakefully that night, ridden by deepening anxieties....
For Cally had carried her extraordinary point; now that Jack Dalhousie was henceforward indifferent to all these matters.
She had said, with the deadly flatness of the mood which her mother so dreaded, that she wanted to go home to-night, and there had been no reasoning with her. Go home for what? Mrs. Heth had asked it twenty times, battling desperately against the menacing madness, now with argument and threat, now with tears and wheedlings. And Cally, proceeding dry-eyed with her dressing and bag-packing, had proved unable to produce a single solid reason.