Grace Perivale and Arthur Haldane had been friends, but nothing more. There had been no suggestion of any deeper feeling, though when their friendship began, two seasons ago, it had seemed to her as if there might be something more. She looked back at last year, and saw that Colonel Rannock and his 'cello had kept this more valued friend at a distance. She remembered Haldane calling upon her one afternoon when she and Rannock were playing a duet, and how quickly he had gone, with apologies for having interrupted their music.
She had met him three or four times of late among the morning riders, and he had neither courted nor avoided her recognition which had been cold and formal. She did not take the initiative in cutting people, for that would have looked as if she had something to be ashamed of. She only made all salutations as distant as possible.
She stayed at home all day playing, reading, walking about her room, looking at the flowers, sitting in the balcony, which she had shaded with a striped awning, trying to make it like Italy. She was too eager for the old lawyer's visit to apply her mind seriously to anything.
The poodle, who followed all her movements with a tepid interest, wondered at her restlessness, and was glad when the maid came to take him for his afternoon airing in the park, where he ran on the flower-beds, and was regarded as an enemy by the park-keepers.
Half-past four came at last, and Mr. Harding was announced on the stroke of the half-hour. Lady Perivale received him in her largest drawing-room. She did not want him to see all the frivolities—jardinières, book-stands, easels, eccentric work-baskets, and fantastical china monsters—of her den, lest he should think lightly of her. The Louis Seize drawing-rooms, with their large buhl cabinets, holding treasures of old Sèvres and Dresden, were serious enough for the reception-rooms of a Lord Chief Justice or an Archbishop. Even her dress was severe, a blue cloth gown, with only a little bullion embroidery on the primrose satin waistcoat. Her dark auburn hair was brushed back from the broad brow, and her hazel eyes, with golden lights in them, looked grave and anxious, as she shook hands with the family counsellor.
"Please choose a comfortable chair, Mr. Harding," she said. "I have a long story to tell you. But perhaps you have heard it already?"
Mr. Harding looked mystified. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of about sixty, with a massive brow and a benevolent head, and a countenance that had acquired dignity since his sandy hair and foxy beard had turned to silver.
"Indeed, Lady Perivale, I have heard nothing involving your interests."
"Well, then, I shall have to begin at the beginning. It is a horrid business, but so preposterous that one could almost laugh at it."