Mrs. Compton looked helplessly round the table.
"Does any one know—I haven't seen Mrs. Barclay for days——"
"You can call her Miss Fersen," Mrs. Smithers broke in doggedly.
"Well, you know who I mean. Perhaps she's taken shelter——"
"It was raining when she started out. That was this morning early—after that woman came——"
"What woman——?"
"Mrs. Barclay—a nigger, like him."
Mrs. Smithers was uncompromising—violent. She did not care that she interrupted, that forty of Gaya's most important inhabitants stared at her with varying feelings of consternation and annoyance. She was frightened. Her fear had tightened its hold with every hour of futile waiting, till what self-consciousness she had was stifled out of her. Her fear was everything. These people were nothing. Her disparagement of them expressed itself in every line of her grim, ashen features.
"You mean"—Colonel Armstrong leant back judicially in his chair, fingering the stem of his wine-glass "you mean actually that Mrs.—your mistress discovered this morning—that—that, in fact, her marriage had been illegal——?"
"That's it. She wasn't his wife—never had been, thank God."