He had risen as she rose and went to open the door for her. He escorted her through the smoke-room and stood there at the further door, holding out his hand, benignant and superbly solemn.
"Good night, then," he said.
She told herself that she was wrong, quite wrong about his poor old face. There was nothing in it, nothing but that grave and unadventurous benignity. His mood had been, she judged, purely paternal. Paternal and childlike, too; pathetic, if you came to think of it, in his clinging to her presence, her companionship. "It must have been my little evil mind," she thought.
3
As she went along the corridor she remembered she had left her knitting in the drawing-room. She turned to fetch it and found Fanny still there, wide awake with her feet on the fender, and reading "Tono-Bungay."
"Oh, Mrs. Waddington, I thought you'd gone to bed."
"So did I, dear. But I changed my mind when I found myself alone with
Wells. He's too heavenly for words."
Barbara saw it in a flash, then. She knew what she, the companion and secretary, was there for. She was there to keep him off her, so that Fanny might have more time to find herself alone in.
She saw it all.
"'Tono-Bungay,'" she said. "Was that what you sent me out with Mr.
Bevan for?"