"Good-bye," said Mrs. Potten, just outside the threshold of the door. "And if you see Bernard—I believe he means to go to tea at the Hardings—would you remind him that it is at Eliston's that he has to pick me up? There are attractions about!" added Mrs. Potten mysteriously, "and he may forget! Poor Bernard, such a good fellow in his way, but so wild, and he sometimes talks as if he were almost a conscientious objector, only he's too old for it to matter. I don't allow him to argue with me. I can't follow it—and don't want to. But he's a dear fellow."
Lady Dashwood walked into the post-office. "Thank goodness, I can think now," she said to herself, as she went to a desk.
The wire ran as follows:—
"Sorry. Saturday quite impossible. Writing."
It was far from cordial, but cordial Lady Dashwood had no intention of being. She meant to do her duty and no more by Belinda. Duty would be hard enough. And when she wrote the letter, what should she say?
"If only something would happen, some providential accident," thought Lady Dashwood, unconscious of the contradiction involved in the terms. The word "providential" caused her to go on thinking. If there were such things as ghosts, the "ghost" of the previous night might have been providentially sent—sent as a warning! But the thought was a foolish one.
"In any case," she argued, "what is the good of warnings? Did any one ever take warning? No, not even if one rose from the dead to deliver it."
She was too tired to walk about and too tired to want to go again into the Sale room and talk to people. She went back to the rooms, climbed the stairs slowly and then sat down to wait till it was time to go to Mrs. Harding's. Perhaps May would soon have finished seeing Christ Church and come and join her. Her presence was always a comfort.
It was a comfort, perhaps rather a miserable comfort, to Lady Dashwood because she had begun to suspect that May too was suffering, not suffering from wounded vanity, for May was almost devoid of vanity, but from—and here Lady Dashwood leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. It was a strange thing that both Jim and May should have allowed themselves to be martyrised, only May's marriage had been so brief and had ended so worthily, the shallow young man becoming suddenly compelled to bear the burden of Empire, and bearing it to the utmost; but Gwen would meander along, putting all her burdens on other people; and she would live for ever!