Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel brushed past her and went to her own room.
Ethel returned to the library—so called because it contained a few hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel, together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.
Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.
"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."
Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in his pleasantest mood.
"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for you to let it alone?"
This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton, asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of wifely obedience.
When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's boudoir—it was a pink boudoir—where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock luncheon.
"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid, just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only beyond the ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before mirrors.
"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"