“Why?” asked husband and wife.
“Because,” she replied briskly, “could anything be more awful than to have one’s bride, even one’s fiancée, mixed up in such an affair?”
“D’you really think Jean Bower would have been mixed up in it—if she’d been engaged to Tasker?” asked the rector in a pained tone.
“One never can tell,” said Miss Prince sententiously, forgetting—as scandal-mongers are apt to forget—that in this life one cannot have it both ways.
She went on eagerly, “However, Dr. Tasker is out of it, and, next to Harry Garlett himself, the one most affected is Dr. Maclean. Mark my words—there’ll be an awful falling-off in his practice!”
She did not utter that prediction with any touch of regret in her voice, for she had never liked her father’s successor.
After a pause she added, “He showed himself grossly careless, if not worse, when signing poor Emily’s death certificate.”
“He was certainly taken in,” said Mrs. Cole-Wright acidly.
The rector exclaimed: “Yes, indeed! By the way, he made great play to-day with the fact that he was being called as a common, and not as an expert, or skilled, witness.”
“How very odd,” observed Mrs. Cole-Wright. “Surely a doctor is always an expert—or ought to be?”