“Come along, Mrs. Carfax. How’s your husband? And the children? All well, eh? That’s right.”
“I’m so interested to hear that you know a neighbour of ours,” began Mrs. Carfax during the first favourable opportunity at dinner-time.
“Oh! Madge Dakin? Yes. Aunt Laura has been telling me that you are neighbours. She has been staying with us in Paris, as of course you know.”
“Yes. I’m so sorry to hear she is ill.”
Mrs. Carfax helped herself to bread sauce, and waited in suspense.
“Madge is never quite so ill as she thinks she is,” replied Madame Didier in her decisive voice. “It’s all a question of nerves with her. However, I suggested she should go to a doctor who did me a great deal of good some time ago. I’m a real sufferer from nerves. And as I couldn’t keep her any longer—I had visits to pay and so on,—she is boarding with some people in Paris to go on with the treatment.”
The explanation, delivered in Madame Didier’s high thin voice, seemed sufficiently reasonable. Yet Mrs. Carfax was conscious of an under-current.
Her hostess was silent, but the Major, always garrulous, broke in with one of his pet grievances which lasted till the end of the meal, and ended by proving anew, through many ramifications, that the country was going to the dogs.
In the drawing-room, when coffee was served after dinner, and her host had gone to the smoking-room, circumstances for Mrs. Carfax were more propitious.
Madame Didier took out her embroidery, and Mrs. Lovell lay back in an easy-chair, and warmed her feet at the fire.