§ 2
He found his father and mother and two sisters in the drawing-room, and it seemed to him that their greeting had a queer, uneasy quality about it, a kind of abstraction—as if their thoughts were centred on something more engrossing than his return. When he had gone his round of kisses and handshakes, Lady Alard seemed suddenly to express the real interest of the party by crying in a heartbroken voice——
“Peter! what do you think has happened?”
“What?” cried Peter sharply. He had a vision of a foreclosing mortgagee.
“It’s Mary!” wailed Lady Alard—“Julian is divorcing her.”
“Mary!”
Peter was genuinely shocked—the Alards did not appear in the divorce court; also his imagination was staggered at the thought of Mary, the fastidious, the pure, the intense, being caught in the coarse machinery of the state marriage laws.
“Yes—isn’t it utterly dreadful? It appears he’s had her watched by detectives ever since she left him, and now they’ve found something against her—at least they think they have. It was that time she went abroad with Meg Sellons, and Charles joined them at Bordighera—which I always said was unwise. But the worst of all, Peter, is that she says she won’t defend herself—she says that she’s done nothing wrong, but she won’t defend herself—she’ll let Julian put her away, and everyone will think she’s—oh, Peter, this will finish me—it really will. When I got Mary’s letter I had the worst attack I’ve had for years—we had to send for Dr. Mount in the middle of the night. I really thought——”
Sir John interrupted her——
“You’d better let me finish, Lucy. The subject is legal, not medical. Mary has behaved like a fool and run her head into Julian’s trap. I don’t know how much there is in it, but from what she says I doubt if he has much of a case. If she’ll defend it, she’ll probably be able to clear herself, and what’s more I bet she could bring a counter-petition.”