"Come in by the park side, I mean through the garden—the gate is unlocked, and I will let you in by the window. Be careful as you walk across the flags, it's very slippery to-night. Can you come now, at once?"
Althea hesitated a moment. Then she answered, in her low, even voice, "Yes, I'll come now, at once."
A kindness? What kindness could she, Althea Scrope, do Joan Panfillen? The fear of the other woman, the hidden distrust with which she regarded her, gathered sudden force. Not lately, but in the early days of Scrope's marriage, Mrs. Panfillen had more than once tried to use her friend's wife, believing—strange that she should have made such a mistake—that Althea might succeed where she herself had failed in persuading Scrope for his own good. Althea now told herself that no doubt Joan wished to see her on some matter connected with Perceval's coming speech.
As this thought came to her Althea's white forehead wrinkled in vexed thought. It was too bad that she should have to go out now, when she was expecting Mr. Bustard, to whom she had one or two rather important things to say about his sister——But stay, why should he be told that she was out? Why indeed should she be still out when Mr. Bustard did come? It was not yet five o'clock, and he seldom came before a quarter past. With luck she might easily go over to Joan Panfillen's house and be back before he came.
Althea walked quickly out of the drawing-room and down into the hall. Her fur cloak had been carefully hung up as she had directed. Perceval always said Luke was a stupid servant, but she liked Luke; he was careful, honest, conscientious, a very different type of man from the butler, Dockett.
Althea passed out into the chilly, foggy air. Delahay Street, composed of a few high houses, looked dark, forbidding, deserted. She had often secretly wondered why her husband chose to live in such a place. Of course she knew that their friends raved about the park side of the house, but the wife of Perceval Scrope scarcely ever went in or out of her own door without remembering a dictum of her father's: "Nothing makes up for a good front entrance."
Althea walked quickly towards Great George Street; to the left she passed Boar's Head Yard, where lived an old cabman in whom she took an interest, and whose cab generally stood at Storey's Gate.
How strange to think that here had once stood Oliver Cromwell's house! Her husband had told her this fact very soon after their marriage; it had seemed to please him very much that they lived so near the spot where Cromwell had once lived. Althea even at the time had thought this pleasure odd, in fact affected, on Perceval's part.
If the great Protector's house stood there now, filled with interesting little relics of the man, she could have understood, perhaps to a certain extent sympathised with, Perceval's feeling, for Cromwell had been one of her father's heroes. But to care or pretend to care for a vanished association——!
But Perceval was like that. No man living—or so Althea believed—was so full of strange whimsies and fads as was Perceval Scrope! And so thinking of him she suddenly remembered, with a tightening of the heart, how often her husband's feet had trodden the way she was now treading, hastening from the house which she had just left to the house to which she was now going.