Mrs. Hayden thereupon followed an impulse.
“If it were not for Natalie Spencer,” she said, following that lady's sables with malevolent eyes, “I should be very happy in something I want to tell you. Can we find a corner somewhere?”
And Doctor Haverford had followed her uneasily, behind some palms. She was a thin little woman with a maddening habit of drawing her tight veil down even closer by a contortion of her lower jaw, so that the rector found himself watching her chin rather than her eyes.
“I want you to know right away, as Marion's clergyman, and ours,” she had said, and had given her jaw a particularly vicious wag and twist. “Of course it is not announced—I don't believe even the Spencers know it yet. I am only telling you now because I know how dearly”—she did it again—“how dearly interested you are in all your spiritual children. Marion is engaged to Graham Spencer.”
The rector had not been a shining light for years without learning how to control his expression. He had a second, too, while she contorted her face again, to recover himself.
“Thank you,” he said gravely. “I much appreciate your telling me.”
Mrs. Hayden had lowered her voice still more. The revelation took on the appearance of conspiracy.
“In the early spring, probably,” she said, “we shall need your services, and your blessing.”
So that was the end of one dream. He had dreamed so many—in his youth, of spiritualizing his worldly flock; in middle life, of a bishopric; he had dreamed of sons, to carry on the name he had meant to make famous. But the failures of those dreams had been at once his own failure and his own disappointment. This was different.
He was profoundly depressed. He wandered out of the crowd and, after colliding with a man from the caterer's in a dark rear hall, found his way up the servant's staircase to the small back room where he kept the lares and penates of his quiet life, his pipe, his fishing rods, a shabby old smoking coat, and back files of magazines which he intended some day to read, when he got round to it.