“Your husband has kept his promise, Mrs. Murchison.”
“Is he here?”
“Yes, yonder, with my wife.”
Betty Steel’s face was tinged with a malignity that leaked from her eyes and from the sneering angles of her mouth. She felt glad that Catherine’s favorite child was dead. The incomprehensible malice in the thought justified itself in the reflection that Catherine had lost something that she, Betty, had always lacked.
She passed James Murchison as she returned towards the house, a man with a certain dignity of past suffering writ heavily upon his face. He was talking to two old friends. Betty swept by him without troubling to notice whether he bowed to her or not. The man was a mere pawn in the game so far as she was concerned. Any humiliation that he might suffer was only valuable so far as it humiliated his wife.
The carriage was waiting for them under the limes of Canon’s Court. Madge Ellison flounced down in her corner with a relieved sigh.
“What a function! Well, how is she, charming as ever?”
“Who?”
“You know whom I mean, Betty?”
“That beast?”