“It has been such a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” said Mrs. Parker; “and we should be so very glad if you would visit us. Ennismore Gardens, you know.”
Miss Verinder, in a somewhat absent-minded style, said she would be pleased to avail herself of this invitation some time or other.
“Any time,” said Mrs. Parker. “Of course, we know how much you are sought after.”
The year 1911 was the longest that Emmie had as yet experienced. The last of Dyke’s letters told her that he expected to cross the Antarctic Circle in January, and then the immense silence began. She spent a couple of months at least at Endells with his father, who had been ill; and she and the old man encouraged each other to hope for almost impossible things. Notwithstanding insufficiency of preparation, unsuitability of vessel, doubtful allegiance of subordinates, “Why should not Tony pull it off this time?” Heavily handicapped, yes, but with such inexhaustible power in him himself. Emmie, hoping more and more, was ready to abandon painfully acquired knowledge, and to believe that only luck was needed. All luck really. The luck must turn in his favour—he had always said so. Moreover, who should venture to assign any limit to the probable in the case of such a man? He was so miraculous.
Having no literary work on hand, she went about among her neighbours much more than in the past. She liked and sympathised with the youthful generation. She listened to music with Mrs. Bell, and was always ready to join a bridge table even at the shortest notice. She played the game accurately and boldly; and one evening, when she dined at the Parkers and the young people prevailed on Mr. Parker to countenance poker, she astonished everybody by her manner of sharing in this more reckless amusement. There was a gentle inscrutability about Miss Verinder at poker that proved deadly to ardent and excited adolescence. One of the young men, cleaned out, stood dolefully behind her chair and afterwards reported that he saw her do a bluff big enough to lift the roof. He said it had given him palpitations of the heart to watch her.
But all these slight interests, the concerts, the cards, the tea-parties, as it were dancing and flickering on the surface of her existence, were as nothing; the true Miss Verinder was far otherwise engaged. The world of Parkers and Bells, and tradesmen and cabdrivers, never once met her. Or if for a moment anyone caught a glimpse of her, she had flown away next moment and was back with her wandering man. So that one may truly say of her that often, as she passed along the broad smooth pavement round the corner into Prince Consort Road, she was in reality breathlessly clambering over hummocks of ice; or that when in the quiet flat she put down a saucer of milk for Bijou the cat, that small useless creature had swelled for her into the largest kind of Weddell seal.
The silence remained unbroken, over Christmas and on into the new year of 1912. One morning in March, Mrs. Bell asked her to come to tea next day, the eighth of the month. It was a date that Emmie never afterwards forgot.
She said she was sorry; she had an engagement.
“Oh, what a pity. I’m expecting the Alderleys and I wanted you to know them. Can’t you come in afterwards?”