“He’s a very good-natured fellow. It was decent of him to put me up at the Albany while our house was let. By the way, he has some seats for the first night of a new piece this evening. He suggested that we might all dine at the Albany and go on to the theatre.” He hesitated a moment. “Jill will be there,” he said, and felt easier now that her name had at last come into the talk. “She’s longing to meet you.”
“Then why didn’t she meet me?”
“Here, do you mean? At the station? Well, I—I wanted you to see her for the first time in pleasanter surroundings.”
“Oh!” said Lady Underhill shortly.
It is a disturbing thought that we suffer in this world just as much by being prudent and taking precautions as we do by being rash and impulsive and acting as the spirit moves us. If Jill had been permitted by her wary fiancé to come with him to the station to meet his mother, it is certain that much trouble would have been avoided. True, Lady Underhill would probably have been rude to her in the opening stages of the interview, but she would not have been alarmed and suspicious; or, rather, the vague suspicion which she had been feeling would not have solidified, as it did now, into definite certainty of the worst. All that Derek had effected by his careful diplomacy had been to convince his mother that he considered his bride-elect something to be broken gently to her.
She stopped and faced him.
“Who is she?” she demanded. “Who is this girl?”
Derek flushed.
“I thought I made everything clear in my letter.”
“You made nothing clear at all.”