"I imagine quite the contrary. We can easily see who is right by peeping through the Venetian blinds into the drawing-room. I don't think the shutters are closed yet."
The two girls step lightly back and peep. They see Addie seated at her end of the table, cracking nuts, with absorbed downcast face, a little red with the exertion, and Mr. Armstrong, at his end of the table, sipping his wine silently, apparently occupied with manufacturing thoughts, the evening edition of the "Kelvick Mercury" resting on his knee.
"There," hisses Pauline triumphantly—"there! Did I not tell you? There's the attentive, courteous husband, returning after a three-days' absence to the bosom of his family! There's a picture after Hogarth for you with a vengeance, and they not a month married yet! Oh, fie!"
"Pauline, Pauline, how clever you are!" breathes Lottie ecstatically. "I wish I could see things like you."
"Well, Lottie, that's a picture I'd rather not see anyhow. It inspires me with no feeling of elation, I can tell you; on the contrary—"
"But, Pauline, I heard you say twenty times that Addie's marriage was not like any one else's, that she could not be expected to care for Mr. Armstrong as if he were one of her own class, young and a gentleman, and all that, you know!"
"I know. The marriage was one of convenience on his side—of necessity almost on hers; but, all the same, it's rather too soon for them to have found out their mistake—rather too soon. I suppose it's all Addie's fault. She's so awfully hot-blooded and impulsive. Bob and I are the only two with heads in any way steady on our shoulders. What a little fool she will be if she quarrels with her bread-and-butter before the honeymoon is out—such good bread-and-butter too!"
"And you think she may, seriously?"
"I don't know. I can't tell. I'm almost afraid to turn my thoughts to the third volume"—with a quick impatient sigh. "I hope it will not end as it did with the Greenes of Green Park. If it does that will be a precious bad look-out, Lottchen, for you, for me, and for the boys—precious bad!"