Adela of course saw nothing of her mother's feelings; she never had been allowed to see anything of them and she was not allowed now.
The old lady was outwardly as she had ever been, although she spoke less and, if you watched her, you could see sometimes that her hands were shaking. She used paint for her cheeks and she rouged her lips. Her love of fantastic things had grown very much, and, on the little table behind her chair, there was a row of strange china animals and some Indian dolls with wooden limbs that jangled when you touched them.
But Adela was no longer afraid of her mother. Stimulate it as she would, force upon herself her sensations of the days when she had been afraid, as she did, still the terror would not now confront her. There had been a dreadful scene when the Duchess had been told that her daughter was acting on the same committee as Mrs. Bronson, the dazzling American ... a terrible scene ... but Adela had come through it without a tremor—it had not affected her at all. "It isn't that I've changed much either. I'm just as nervous of other things—I'm just the same coward...."
Perhaps it was, a little, that the war had altered one's values—So many Beaminster necessities were not quite so necessary—
Certainly John felt the same, and the one consolation to Adela, through all this horrible time, was that she had grown nearer to John than she had ever been to anyone—John and she had been attacked by the Real World, both of them at the same moment, and they did find comfort, at this terrifying crisis, in being together.
But all Adela's energy was directed towards concealing from her mother that there was any change at all—"She must think that things are just the same, exactly the same. She mustn't ever know that ... well, that ..."
She could not put it into words. Her Grace's illness was never alluded to by any member of the household.
There came word, at the beginning of March, that Roddy had been moved up to London, that Rachel had taken a little house in York Terrace overlooking Regent's Park, that Roddy was wonderfully cheerful, suffered pain at times, but was, on the whole marvellous—
Two or three days after this news when Christopher arrived at 104 on his usual morning visit Lord John met him in the hall.
"I say, come in here a minute," he said, leading the way into his own little smoking-room—Lord John was fatter, scarcely now as rubicund, as shining as he had been—as neat and clean as ever, but there were lines on his forehead, and in his eye, that glance of surprise that had always been there had advanced into one of alarm—