“Of course these shoes must go back; and we’ll have the shop send up a lot for you to choose from this afternoon. And now I’m going to ask a great favour of you, Miss Morley. I don’t like being alone, and I wish you would come and dine with me again to-night; I shall very likely be all alone—you know my husband is in Boston, and Mr. Wayne is very uncertain. We can have a fine, long evening together. You know I’m just a little bit jealous that Mrs. Blair has a share in your work, and here am I, quite on the outside!”
“I shall be very glad to come,” said Jean; “only, it will spoil me, so much splendour! I’ll have to go down to my boarding house from school, but I’ll come here late in the afternoon.”
“That is very dear of you. If I’m not in when you come you will be expected; and do make yourself perfectly at home. That strange Mr. Walsh has asked me to drive with him in the park this afternoon—he’s a great horseman, you know, and an old friend of Mr. Craighill’s. I’m just a little afraid of him; but he really means to be kind, don’t you think so? He seemed very much interested in you last night—he told me you were very nice—there!”
“He’s very interesting and very kind, I think. He and my grandfather know each other. I’ll come, then, about five.”
Mrs. Craighill sighed heavily as she saw the girl depart; but after all, things were not so ill. The absence of Mrs. Blair was nothing short of providential; and Jean Morley seemed the least suspicious of young women. Very likely, by the time Mrs. Blair returned, the girl would have forgotten the meeting at Rosedale and what, Mrs. Craighill asked herself, with an access of virtue built upon the cheerier mood in which Jean had left her, what was there to awaken suspicion in any mind? Wayne she had ceased to consider at all; his conduct had been unpardonable, and she was well rid of him. It did not matter whether he came home to dine or not; if he appeared she would punish him by withdrawing early, with her guest, to whom his attentions had been so marked, and leave him to his own devices.
Her grievance against her husband for leaving her behind, for reasons that were in themselves an insult, hung darkly in the background. She was aware that she never could feel the same toward him; in her heart she had characterized him in harsh terms that repeated themselves over and over in her mind.
She had received a brief note from him, pencilled on the train, and a clipping from a New York paper with the programme of the Boston meeting. He had missed her, he said, and would be glad to be home again. (There was a little sigh, she knew, that accompanied such a declaration as this, implying weariness of public cares and a longing for the peace worn warriors crave at their own firesides.) The clipping she placed on his dressing-table; the note she tossed into the fire contemptuously.
She dressed before luncheon for the drive with Walsh, and found to her surprise that the thought of going with him had grown less hateful. Even if he had undertaken to watch her, it was rather interesting that one had to be watched. Her husband had sacrificed her on the altar of his own vanity without the slightest compunction. The dignity of life, the fine security and chivalrous protection which she had expected to gain by her marriage had faded into nothing.
She put on her hat and coat and waited for Walsh at her sitting room window, and punctually at half-past two his cutter whirled smartly into the grounds and round to the porte cochère. She took account of his burly figure and his sturdy arms holding the taut reins over the spirited, graceful animal he drove. His cap, drawn low on his head, made him almost grotesque.
She was about to run down, to save him the trouble of ringing, when the maid brought her an immediate delivery letter that had just been left at the door. She glanced at the superscription and clutched it in her gloved fingers for a moment before opening it, as though at truce with bad news. It was a letter of length in a woman’s hand, loose and scrawling as though by one distraught. Mrs. Craighill raised her veil and read; or rather she caught at the sentences which seemed to dart at her from the paper: