“And now there’s all this wretched tittle-tattle about you!” chafed Lady Susan. “My poor little Ann, it really is a stroke of the most fiendish ill-luck.”
Ann nodded.
“Yes. Don’t you see how impossible it is for me to clear myself? We were there. It’s true.”
“I do see,” replied Lady Susan in a worried tone. “It’s just the kind of coil that’s hardest of all to straighten out. A lot of untrue gossip founded upon actual fact—and there’s nothing more difficult to combat than a half-truth.”
“Oh, well”—Ann jumped up restlessly out of her chair. “It’s smashed up everything for me. And when you’ve crashed I don’t suppose a little ill-natured gossip more or less matters very much. Did you know Mrs. Carberry cut me this morning in the village high-street?” she added with a smile.
“Did she indeed?” said Lady Susan, a grim note in her usually pleasant voice. “Of course, the whole business is nuts to her—she’s aching to plant that prunes-and-prisms daughter of hers on Eliot Coventry. Well, I think I carry weight enough in the neighbourhood to put a stop to that kind of insolence.” She paused reflectively. “I shall open my campaign with a big dinner-party—and you and Robin will come to it. I’ll shoot off the invitations to-morrow. Don’t worry, Ann. If, between us, your friends can’t manage to scotch this kind of dead-set some people are making at you, my name’s not Susan Hallett.” She rose and slipped her arm round Ann’s shoulders in a gesture of unwonted tenderness. “And for the rest, my dear—try and believe things will come straight in the end. You’re in the long lane, now—but you’ll find the turning some day, I feel sure.”
The following morning Brian Tempest arrived at the Cottage. Ann greeted him with a smile, half sad, half bitter.
“Have you come to call down fulminations of wrath on my devoted head?” she asked.
The rector’s kind eyes were puckered round with little creases of distress.
“Did you think that?” he asked.