The evening passed in placid dreariness. Mrs. Tregonell sat brooding in her armchair—pondering whether she should or should not tell Christabel everything—knowing but too well how the girl's happiness was dependent upon her undisturbed belief in her lover, yet repeating to herself again and again that it was right and fair that Christabel should know the truth—nay, ever so much better that she should be told it now, when she was still free to shape her own future, than that she should make the discovery later, when she was Angus Hamleigh's wife. This last consideration—the thought, that a secret which was everybody's secret must inevitably, sooner or later, become known to Christabel—weighed heavily with Mrs. Tregonell; and through all her meditations there was interwoven the thought of her absent son, and how his future welfare might depend upon the course to be taken now.
Christabel played and sang, while the Major and Jessie Bridgeman sat at bezique. The friendship of these two had been in no wise disturbed by the Major's offer, and the lady's rejection. It was the habit of both to take life pleasantly. Jessie took pains to show the Major how sincerely she valued his esteem—how completely she appreciated the fine points of his character; and he was too much a gentleman to remind her by one word or tone of his disappointment that day in the wood above Maidenhead.
The evening came to its quiet end at last. Christabel had scarcely left her piano in the dim little third room—she had sat there in the faint light, playing slow sleepy nocturnes and lieder, and musing, musing sadly, with a faint sick dread of coming sorrow. She had seen it in her aunt's face. When the old buhl clock chimed the half-hour after ten the Major got up and took his leave, bending over Mrs. Tregonell as he pressed her hand at parting to murmur: "Remember," with an accent as solemn as Charles the Martyr's when he spoke to Juxon.
Mrs. Tregonell answered never a word. She had been pondering and wavering all the evening, but had come to no fixed conclusion.
She bade the two girls good-night directly the Major was gone. She told herself that she had the long tranquil night before her for the resolution of her doubts. She would sleep upon this vexed question. But before she had been ten minutes in her room there came a gentle knock at the door, and Christabel stole softly to her side.
"Auntie, dear, I want to talk to you before you go to bed, if you are not very tired. May Dormer go for a little while?"
Dormer, gravest and most discreet of handmaids, whose name seemed to have been made on purpose for her, looked at her mistress, and receiving a little nod, took up her work and crept away. Dormer was never seen without her needlework. She complained that there was so little to do for Mrs. Tregonell that unless she had plenty of plain sewing she must expire for want of occupation, having long outlived such frivolity as sweethearts and afternoons out.
When Dormer was gone, Christabel came to her aunt's chair, and knelt down beside it just as she had done at Mount Royal, when she told her of Angus Hamleigh's offer.
"Aunt Diana, what has happened, what is wrong?" she asked, coming at the heart of the question at once. There was no shadow of doubt in her mind that something was sorely amiss.
"How do you know that there is anything wrong?"