She turned very pale.
"Vincent!" she exclaimed.
"It is a question of taking sides," he went on, with perfect composure; "and I go over to the other side. They most need help: they are poor and friendless. I hope the mischief you have done is not irreparable; I cannot tell; but I dare say when you and I meet again time will have shown."
She was thunderstruck and stupefied; she did not even seek to detain him as he left the room. For there was a curious air of self-possession, of resolution, about his manner: this was no pique of disappointed passion, nor any freak of temper. And she could not but ask herself, in a breathless sort of way, whether after all he might not be in the right about those people; and, in that case, what was this that she had brought about? She was frightened—too frightened to reason with herself, perhaps: she only saw Vincent leaving his father's roof—cutting himself off from his own family—and she had a dumb consciousness that it was her work, through some fatal error of judgment. And she seemed to know instinctively that this step that he had taken was irrevocable—and that she was in some dim way responsible for all that had occurred.
When Lord Musselburgh arrived, he and Harland Harris came upstairs together; and almost directly afterwards luncheon was announced. As they were about to go down to the dining-room the great Communist-capitalist looked round with a little air of impatience and said—
"But where is Vin?"
"He was here a short time ago," said Lady Musselburgh: she dared not say more.
Mr. Harris, from below, sent a message to his son's room: the answer—which Lady Musselburgh heard in silence—was that they were not to wait luncheon for him.
"Too busy with his reply to the Sentinel," Musselburgh suggested. "Sharp cuts and thrusts going. I wonder that celestial minds should grow so acrid over such a subject as the nationalisation of tithe."
There was some scuffle on the stairs outside, to which nobody (except Lady Musselburgh, whose ears were painfully on the alert) paid any attention; but when a hansom was called up to the front door, Harland Harris happened to look out.