To which Mrs. Barrimore replied:
“No, it is certainly not Dan. Phyllis treated him with marked coldness. It cannot be anyone new either, for she sees no one but Philip, and you know that anything in that quarter is quite out of the question. It is possible that she is fretting anew for Captain Arbuthnot. I wish she would trust me! I am very, very fond of her.”
To this Colonel Lane replied by reiterating his former opinion.
“I know her better than you do, my dear friend,” he wrote. “She has a new fancy. She always behaves the same when she has a new fancy! Do not fear for her health. That is all right. But I think (if I may so far burden you, and I know I may!) that you should accompany her on her ‘supposed’ visits to Philip.”
This last letter worried Mrs. Barrimore not a little. She hated the suggestion of “spying” which the Colonel’s request involved. Yet she remembered having told Phyllis (on one of those summer afternoons when there was a garden-party at Hawk’s Nest) that she ought not to visit Philip alone.
Phyllis had been wilful. She had had her way; but Mrs. Barrimore had never approved of the visits to the bungalow. As a matter of fact, she was in ignorance of the frequency of these visits. She fully agreed with Colonel Lane’s desire that she should accompany the girl.
But it was actually repellent to this woman to “spy” or do anything that was not absolutely above-board.
For this reason, after a bewildering half-hour of racking thought, which left her head aching, she went in search of Phyllis to “have it out.”
Phyllis was certainly not gone out, for rain had been pouring down unceasingly since breakfast. But though Mrs. Barrimore visited the drawing-room, the dining-room, and finally the smoking-room (incidentally waking up Uncle Robert, who had gone to sleep over the fire—and the Times), she failed to discover the girl. Mrs. Barrimore had passed Phyllis’s bedroom as she had come downstairs, and had seen through the open door that the room was empty.
Suddenly she recalled the fact that when last they had been together in Robertson Street, Phyllis had said: “Do you mind if while you go into Plummer’s, I run to that art shop in Wellington Place to get a few tubes of oil colors?”