"My poor friend, what in Heaven's name must you think of us all!"
"Of you all?" (True enough, there had been another!) She had thought volumes, comedies, tragedies, melodramas, but what she thought didn't so much matter as did the fact that he had not, whatever festivities he had honored, dined. Shouldn't they have something here together before the fire?
"I seem," she said, "to have a blighting effect upon my host."
"My friend Westboro' is the happiest man in Glousceshire."
"Which means that he has found his Duchess?"
"He has found his Duchess."
When her friend entered the room, by the light on his face like the brightness of the morning as he caught sight of her, Mary Falconer saw that for Jimmy Bulstrode she was still the one woman in the world. In the relief that this knowledge brought her she half attempted to play with what had been her suspicions, and to tease him, but this mood passed.
"That's a horrid old parson they chose to have me dine with," she said. "He told me dreadful scandals but I think now that I see through them all. The Duchess of Westboro' has been living incognita at The Dials, hasn't she, and her husband at last found her there?"
Bulstrode acknowledged that she had read the drama correctly. And Mary Falconer laughed.
"Yes, evidently the Duchess has a strong dramatic sense; she's very romantic, isn't she?"