“Mayn’t we drive you home?” Susie suggested. “Our car is there.” Mrs. Gainsborough threw up her hands and followed, murmuring. As they drove home through the crowded, dripping streets, Evangeline and Teresa crushed suffocatingly under the shadow of Mrs. Gainsborough’s knees, Susie’s kind little face peeping from behind a bunch of aged ostrich tips in Mrs. Gainsborough’s bonnet, all three of them disconcerted by the unusual smell of warm eau-de-Cologne that filled their car, very little was said. Mrs. Gainsborough was at her request left on the doorstep of a house, cinnamon-coloured like the Fultons’, at the corner of a cinnamon-coloured square. Once safely on her own territory her nervousness left her, and her smiles and genuine pleasure in the small service rendered brought Teresa another fleeting vision of the joy she perpetually sought.
CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Gainsborough soon returned the hospitality of Susie’s motor by inviting her and Cyril to dinner. Her note was rambling and agitated like her manner, and ended with a postscript, “Please bring one of your daughters if she would care for it. Emma will be so pleased.”
Evangeline and Teresa refused to have anything to do with it when the letter came, but Cyril said with genuine terror to Teresa when his wife had gone out of the room, “Dicky, you must come—promise me quick—but don’t say anything about it——”
“All right, of course,” she assured him, “but why?”
“They’re all schoolmasters,” he explained in an undertone as Susie came back. Nothing more was said until breakfast was over and then Teresa plunged for her father’s sake.
“Can I go to the Gainsboroughs’, after all, Mother?”
“If you like, dear, but I thought you said just now——”
“I know,” she interrupted, “but—I should like to see the University. I think the Gainsborough girl would like it.”
Mrs. Fulton looked suspiciously at her husband. He was filling his cigarette case from a box on the mantelpiece, using unnecessary care to fit them in properly.