"Yes, yes, dear. I know, I know!"
Mrs. Verulam patted Chloe's hands gently. Then she smiled, and said:
"You should have come over in the tweed suit, Chloe, then London would have been at your feet."
She spoke without definite intention, merely anxious to tide over an awkward moment. She heard no strange echo of her remark replying from the future in tones to mock her. She saw no little cloud rising upon the horizon. She thrilled with no convulsive premonition of a marching destiny approaching stealthily with slippered feet. And when Chloe looked at her fixedly for the space of three minutes, and then said slowly, "Should I? Should I?" she thought nothing of it. Nor did she specially remark her friend's sudden absence of mind, or the expression of curious whimsicality that stole into her face. The human soul is sometimes strangely unobservant in great crises.
"Are you at home this afternoon?" Chloe remarked abruptly.
"No, not to anyone."
"I'm glad. Let me go upstairs and change my dress, and then I want to talk to you ever so much more. Oh, that horrible, wicked paragraph!"
Mrs. Verulam touched the bell. Francis answered it.
"Please send Mrs. Marriner to me," she said.
Francis retired smiling, and in a moment the faithful Marriner appeared sedately in the aperture of the door.