I would have gone up to bed, but that meant a candle and queer, shaky shadows on the wall; so I stayed with Daphne and looked at the picture of a young man in a uniform.
"Basil Harcourt," Daphne said absently, with a pen in her mouth, when I asked about it. "Taken years ago before he became an ass. How do you spell 'Supererogation'?"
"I haven't an idea," I admitted. "I don't even know what it means. I always confuse it with 'eleemosynary'." Daphne grunted. "Do you mean that this is Violet's husband?"
"It was—her first. Don't ask me about him: he always gives me indigestion. The man's mad! He stood right in this room, where he had eaten my ginger-cakes all his life and where he came to show me his first Eton collar and long trousers, and told me that he expected The Cause for his wife to be himself, and if she would rather raise hell for women than a family of children she would have to choose at once. And Violet stood just where you are, Madge, and retorted that maternity was not a Cause, and that any hen in the barnyard could raise a family.
"'I suppose you want to crow,' Basil said furiously, and slammed out. He went to Canada very soon after."
"Then perhaps he won't like our using his house for such a purpose. If he isn't in sympathy——"
"Twaddle," Daphne remarked, poising her pen to go on. "In the first place, it isn't a house—it's a rattletrap; and in the second place, he won't know a thing about it."
It was all very tragic. I was thinking of them when I went out on the terrace in Daphne's mackintosh. The air was damp and sticky, but it was better than Daphne's conversation. I stood in the fountain court, leaning against a column and listening to the spray as it blew over on to the caladium leaves.
I am not sure just when I saw the figure. First it was part of the gloom, a deeper shadow in the misty garden. I saw it, so to speak, out of the tail of my eye. When I looked directly there was nothing there. Finally, I called softly over my shoulder to Daphne, but she did not hear. Instead, the shadow disengaged itself, moved forward and resolved into Bagsby, Daphne's chauffeur.
"I wasn't sure at first that you saw me, Miss," he said, touching his cap. "It's my turn until midnight; Clarkson 'as it until three, and the gardener until daylight."