“Yes, my duet with him: and then we sang the other. They would have liked a third, only we pretended not to understand. It would have made all the others so fearfully savage if we had taken it.”
This speech was not a model of lucidity, but it might have been much clearer and yet unintelligible to George Greswold.
“Do you mind dining alone to-night, my dear Pamela?” he said, trying to speak cheerily. “Your aunt is out—and I—I have some letters to write—and I lunched heavily at Salisbury.”
His heavy luncheon had consisted of a biscuit and a glass of beer at the station. His important business had been a long ramble on Salisbury Plain, alone with his troubled thoughts.
“Did your mistress leave any message for me?” he asked the butler.
“No, sir. Nobody saw my mistress go out. When Louisa went up to dress her for dinner she was gone, sir—but Louisa said there was a letter for you on the bedroom mantelpiece. Shall I send for it, sir?”
“No, no—I will go myself. Serve dinner at once. Miss Ransome will dine alone.”
George Greswold went to the bedroom—that fine old room, the real Queen Anne room, with thick walls and deep-set windows, and old window-seats, and capacious recesses on each side of the high oak chimneypiece, and richly-moulded wainscot, and massive panelled doors, a sober eighteenth-century atmosphere in which it is a privilege to exist—a spacious old room, with old Dutch furniture, of the pre-Chippendale era, and early English china, Worcester simulating Oriental, Chelsea striving after Dresden: a glorious old room, solemn and mysterious as a church in the dim light of a pair of wax-candles which Louisa the maid had lighted on the mantelpiece.
There, between the candles, appeared two letters: “George Greswold, Esq.,” “Miss Ransome.”
The husband’s letter was a thick one, and the style of the penmanship showed how the pen had hurried along, driven by the electric forces of excitement and despair: