Whether it was a mere matter of coincidence or the working of a definite purpose, the fact was curiously self-evident to Betty Steel that the drawing-room of the Canonry had divided itself into two camps. Window-ward sat Miss Carmagee, dressed in black, her large face shining like a buckler against the embattled foe. Porteus—the irascible Porteus who blasphemed all tea-parties—was chattering like a little brown baboon. Several of Kate Murchison’s old friends appeared to have congregated together on the opposition benches. Mrs. Betty remarked all this, and her mouth grew a mere line in her pale and alert face.
The breweress had risen to depart. A number of nervous people who had been waiting for some bold spirit to initiate the movement, followed the fat lady’s inspiriting example. Mrs. Stensly was in the garden. The breweress and her flock of sheep filed through the open window to shake hands—and go.
“Madge.”
“Hallo, dear, am I sitting on you? Whither away?”
“To pay my most dutiful respects!”
Catherine Murchison and the Canon had left the window, and were pacing the grass under the benisons of the great cedar. By the expression of their faces, and the serious yet sympathetic inflection of their voices, they had broken the mere social surface, and were speaking of deeper things. It is the fashion to abuse the priesthood in the abstract, yet any critic who took the clean-girt manliness of Canon Stensly’s character might find his rhetoric chilled in its free flow.
“You have done the right thing, and your true friends will be glad of it.”
“It was my husband’s wish.”
“The wish of a brave man.”
“What a wonderful thing is sympathy! You have helped me so much this afternoon. It was an ordeal. You know, we dread the unknown—uncertainty.”