At Kensington these names had been fatally connected. Kensington knew that Dyke, the famous Anthony Dyke, was at the bottom of everything, at the side of it too, and all round it. The most faithful servants will chatter, even at the risk of losing the best of places. If people are quick at putting two and two together to make four, they are quicker still at putting one and one together to make two. Perhaps Miss Marchant, emissary to Mrs. Pryce-Jones, not really hoodwinked by Mrs. Verinder’s explanation, had continued to keep a watchful eye. Perhaps as well as Miss Marchant, the mournful angels on top of the Albert Memorial had seen the infatuated couple walking side by side, and had told the summer wind while begging it not to carry the news any further. Such things always leaked out somehow—more or less. Thus rumour, busy with both names, had enlivened drawing-rooms, by swift amplification; and in the protracted absence of Miss Verinder there had been reports that somebody or other had met her and Mr. Dyke at Monte Carlo, had lodged next door to them at Folkestone, had bumped into them at Tunbridge Wells.
During the church service she meditated, without emotion, upon her new social status. Glancing at one or two familiar faces she thought she could observe a rigidity of feature, a marble restraint of expression, that was something more than should be produced by absorbed interest in a religious exercise. They could not of course, at such a time and in such a place, even faintly nod or smile at an old friend; but their devotion was not surely quite so profound in past days; this statuesque aspect of the praying saint was surely new and significant. She felt a numb grief at having caused pain to her parents; but she cared nothing for the mental perturbation of these other people.
Except perhaps Mrs. Bell! She felt a sting of regret, a sudden realisation of forlornness, as she noticed that, far from assuming that air of sculptured oblivion, Mrs. Bell from time to time looked at her in a most distressful manner. Mrs. Bell had always shown strong regard for her. Emmie was fond of Mrs. Bell.
As has been mentioned, Mrs. Bell owned one of the largest houses in Queen’s Gate, and it may now be added that her heart was as large as her house. She was a childless widow of forty-two who had earned a widowhood in which she frankly delighted by assiduous care of an elderly invalid husband; loquacious but devoid of malice, indeed exuberantly good-natured, she loved to clothe her pleasant expansive figure with grand garments; fair of complexion, gracious, smiling, when dressed at her grandest she looked blondly opulent like the queen of diamonds in the very best and most expensive packs of cards. She was waiting on the porch steps, when Emmie, after allowing the congregation to depart, herself left the church.
“Now, my dear girl—my dearest Emmeline—you are coming home to lunch with me. That goes without saying.”
She would take no refusal. Her brougham, the last of the carriages remaining on the wet gravel, stood with its door open; she pushed Miss Verinder into it and the footman smothered them with a fur rug. As they drove away Miss Verinder’s eyes for a moment filled with not easily repressible tears. She was touched by the warmth of her friend’s greeting.
“Now I want to tell you,” said Mrs. Bell, with affectionate impressiveness, when she and Emmie had crossed the hospitable threshold and were alone together, “I want to tell you at once that nothing that has happened makes the least difference to me.”
“Thank you, dear Mrs. Bell,” said Emmie gratefully.