Afternoon tea was done, and trays of cut flowers, the contents of a hamper sent by Margaret from Hindhead, had been brought into the room for Mrs. Verinder to arrange in glass vases and dishes. It was a little task that she liked to do herself—perhaps because she did it with so extraordinary a clumsiness and ineptitude. She seized upon these flowers now—lovely long-stalked roses, pink and red—feeling that they would aid her and keep her in countenance; and as she moved about, dabbing the delicious blooms into obviously improper receptacles, breaking a stalk here or there, and slopping a little water on the choice furniture, she looked like a large over-blown actress playing a part in a highly artificial comedy.
“Ah, Emmeline, is that you?” she cried, with a tone so jarringly spurious that Emmeline stopped short on the threshold and understood at once that the trouble was beginning.
“Shut the door, dear. What was I going to say?” And Mrs. Verinder caused a slop-over and a shower of petals with the same brisk movement of her dimpled hand. “Oh, yes. I could not tell you why, but our friend Mr. Anthony Dyke came into my mind just now; and thinking about him, I thought I’d give you a little hint.”
“Yes, mother?”
“To begin with, we scarcely know him.”
“We have not known him very long,” said Emmeline, gently.
“I say, we don’t really know him at all”; and Mrs. Verinder gave a harshly nervous laugh as she mutilated some maidenhair fern. “I mean, nothing about him—who he is, or what he is, himself, outside his notoriety. Then the point is this. Because—I don’t say so, but I thought it might be—because he may have interested you as rather striking, a bizarre figure, and so forth—” Watching Emmeline’s face, she rapidly abandoned a difficult rôle and became more like herself. “I don’t want you to indulge in any silliness about him.”
“What do you mean by silliness?” said Emmeline quietly.
“Well, I don’t want you to fall in love with him.”