In point of fact Mrs. Elles said nothing, but Mrs. Poynder thought she did, and her fury rose.
“You have the face——! Well, it’s more than your man has. He turned as white as a leaf when I was giving him a piece of my mind this morning. He’d nothing to say for himself except that your room was the common room.”
“So it was!”
“Tell that to me! I know what’s what. It’s I that made him promise to marry you, when all’s said and done. But, Lord!—trust him! He’ll not touch you with a pair of tongs! Men aren’t so fond of marrying the women they have disgraced. Mercy, what’s that?” she added in extreme perturbation.
“Only the dinner gong, Aunt,” said Mrs. Elles, spitefully smiling on the other side of the door. She had learned what she wanted. “I can’t come down,” she said decidedly. “Tell Mortimer to come up here and speak to me after he has dined.”
“You give your orders, my lady!” grumbled the older woman. “What’s to say that Mortimer’s going to condescend to even speak to you?”
“Give him my message,” said Mrs. Elles peremptorily.
Mrs. Poynder’s footsteps creaked on the stairs as she withdrew, and her angry mutterings were like a heavy ground swell at sea as she went downstairs. How her niece loathed her! And the man whose comfort and well-being she placed before every other earthly consideration had been exposed for at least half an hour to that malign influence. She realized the full horrors of the scene at the Heather Bell which her aunt had only faintly adumbrated, and most of her thought was for him.
“I must get him out of this,” she said to herself, “at all costs! I used to think myself clever—I shall be clever if I manage this. I don’t care a pin for myself, but for him! If I only knew something about it all—how they set about these things. What can be done? What is possible? If only I could look it up somewhere.”
A vain glance at the little bookcase stocked with Ibsens and Merediths did not help her.