"Fresh worries?"
"No, no, the old, the accustomed, the well-accredited, the normal, the stock ones—a husband and a financial crisis."
As she spoke Madame de Vallorbes fastened the buttons of her long driving-coat. Miss St. Quentin knelt down and busied herself with the lowest of these. Her tall, slender figure was doubled together. She kept her head bent.
"I happen to have a pretty tidy balance just now," she remarked parenthetically, and as though with a certain diffidence. "So you know, if you are a bit hard up—why—it's all perfectly simple, Nellie, don't you know."
For a perceptible space of time Madame de Vallorbes did not answer. A grating of wheels on the gravel arrested her attention. She looked down the long vista of ruddily lighted hall, with its glowing fire and cheerful lamps to the open door, where, against the blear whiteness of the fog, the mail-phaeton and its occupant showed vague, in outline and in proportions almost gigantic against the thick, shifting atmosphere. Miss St. Quentin raised her head, surprised at her companion's silence. Helen de Vallorbes bent down, took the upturned face in both hands and kissed the soft cheeks with effusion.
"You are adorable," she said. "But you are too generous. You shall lend me nothing more. I believe I see my way. I can scrape through this crisis."
Miss St. Quentin rose to her feet.
"All right," she said, smiling upon her friend from her superior height with a delightful air of affection and apology. "I only wanted you just to know, in case—don't you see. And—and—for the rest, how goes it Helen? Are you turning all their poor heads at Brockhurst? You're rather an upsetting being to let loose in an ordinary, respectable, English country-house. A sort of Mousquetaire au couvent the other way about, don't you know. Are you making things fly generally?"
"I am making nothing fly," the other lady rejoined gaily. "I am as inoffensive as a stained-glass saint in a chapel window. I am absolutely angelic."
"That's worst of all," Honoria exclaimed, still smiling. "When you're angelic you are most particularly deadly. For the preservation of local innocents, somebody ought to go and hoist danger signals."