“Are you sure he’s at Aldeburgh?” she now inquired in a deep voice.
“Certainly,” said Cecily, rather stiffly.
Lady Wilmot settled her back more comfortably into the sofa cushions, and metaphorically untied her bonnet-strings.
“My dear Cecily,” she began, “I know I may speak before Rose, and you mustn’t be upset by anything I am going to say. Now Robert has been in town lately, I hear.”
Cecily had risen, and was standing leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down at her guest with a grave face, touched with involuntary displeasure.
“Robert was here a week ago, I believe,” she said, coldly. “He came to see to the opening of the flat, when the servants came back.”
“Precisely,” nodded Lady Wilmot. “Now, my dear Cecily, if you will allow me to say so, you have made several grave mistakes in your dealings with Robert. Oh, yes! I was prepared for a dignified expression, and all that sort of thing. It’s just what a woman honestly endeavoring to do her duty must of necessity expect.” At this point in the monologue Rose somewhat hurriedly changed her seat to a position from which her face was not visible to Lady Wilmot. “In the first place,” pursued that lady, “what, in the name of foolishness, induced you, as a married woman of some years’ standing, to allow Philippa Burton to act as your husband’s secretary? In the second, how could you have the stupidity to leave a man like Robert—or for that matter, any man—for three months? Men will be men, and we can’t stop them. We can only be drags on the wheel. You should have stopped at home, my dear, and been a drag. In the third——”
Cecily made an impatient movement. “I shall feel much obliged, Lady Wilmot, if you will at once tell me why you have called this afternoon,” she said, very coldly.
Lady Wilmot bridled.
“With pleasure,” she returned, quite truthfully. “This day week I was driving past these flats on my way home from a bridge party. It was twelve o’clock at night. Twelve o’clock, I know, because——” For a moment or two Cecily lost the thread of Lady Wilmot’s recital. Her attention was fixed upon something else. From her position by the fireplace she commanded the room. Both the other women had their backs turned towards the door; it was, therefore, only she who saw it quietly open, and Philippa Burton appear on the threshold. As she entered, Lady Wilmot was speaking her name....