"You, you dear!" She suddenly caught him round the neck and hugged him strenuously. "Do you think I don't know—haven't always known how my father and mother treated you!"
"Time heals wounds of that kind," said Saxham, as they turned together from the foot of the staircase, and, still keeping a protecting arm about David's daughter, he reached his hat and stick from the hall-stand, "though you may doubt the statement now."
"I can't. I'd only have to look at mother to——"
"To remember that she is your mother!"
His tone was final in its closure of the subject. But in his heart he thanked frail Mildred once again for her ancient treachery, as he went out to the waiting car, and sped through London's murky streets to the North-West suburb where stands the Hospital.
Patrine went upstairs, holding by the balusters and feeling chilly and old. In the prettily furnished sitting-room, communicating with her chintzy bedroom, were her letters, and a deep cardboard box stood upon a table. It had been sent on to Harley Street from the Club, and bore the address of a Regent Street florist, whose showy establishment boasted a German name.
The fragrance of roses with a musky after-tang in their sweetness permeated the atmosphere. There were no roses amongst the flowers on the chimney-shelf and cabinets. It occurred to Patrine that there must be roses in the box.
Her head was throbbing and her eyes smarted. She threw off her hat and coat, pitched them down upon the chintzy sofa, switched off the electric lights, let up the blinds, pulled a chair close to the open window, and sat down, resting her folded arms on the clean, dustless sill.
Sitting there, staring out into the semi-obscurity of Harley Street, with the late cabs and motors sliding past and the distant roar of Oxford Street in her ears, she asked herself:
"Have I behaved like an honourable woman or—a blithering idiot? That's what I want to know?"