Beyond her announcement to her father lay something vaguely painful which at the moment she did not consider. She would have to tell Lady Drummond and Robin, of course, and it would hurt them: they would be angry with her. She was going to make a scandal, a nine days' wonder. Her father would be grieved—angry, too, perhaps; but that could not be helped either.
And then—some resentment stirred in her heart against him for the first time during all the years in which they had been together. He had kept her in ignorance of her lover's peril. She was not a child that she should have been kept in ignorance. For the moment she had no tender excuses for him. If he had been candid with her, then all this trouble about Robin might have been spared, for she could never have promised herself as wife to another man while the one she loved was in daily and hourly danger.
She went into the house with a look of stern accusation on her young face. The dogs came shrieking down the stairs in vociferous welcome as usual, but she took no notice of them. Being old dogs and wise, they recognised a forbidding mood in her, and retired with deprecating wrigglings of their bodies.
She asked Pat if there were a visitor in the drawing-room.
"No, then, Miss, only the master. I can't make out what came over him at all to be comin' home in a hansom."
He was minded to tell her that the General was not looking himself, to give her an affectionate, intimate warning; but she passed him by. He stood watching her, holding the door open in his hand till she took the bend of the staircase that hid her from his sight.
"Bedad, the Dowager couldn't have done it better," he said, "shweepin' by me without a 'By your l'ave, Pat'; and the master, callin' me 'Murphy' to my face, what he's never done since he left the rig'ment. I wonder what's the matter with Pat. 'Twill be 'Corporal' next."
Nelly looked into the drawing-room. Her father was not there. She turned the handle of another door, the door of the General's own particular den, and going in she found him.
She never thought of asking herself how he came to be there at this hour of the day, he who lived by rule, the click of whose latch-key had sounded in the hall-door every evening at a quarter to seven as long as she could remember. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to ten minutes to five.
The General was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace as though he had dropped into it on his entering the room. He was doing absolutely nothing, and that was an alarming thing enough, if but she had noticed it. A green evening paper was crumpled on his knee. If she had eyes to see it there was calamity in his attitude and his looks. But she had no eyes. She was too much absorbed in the thing she had to do.