"What has made the children so late? I said no later than six." So spoke the lady, eliciting revelations of delay caused by the children hiding themselves. Due public censure of the offence followed.
Challis had become himself again by soup-time. "Well, Polly Anne," said he, "you've never told me how you came to go by East Putney!" The trifling excitement over the child had such a thoroughly old-world flavour with it that he was very much at home again, and Royd Hall had slipped away to dreamland.
"Oh, I?" Marianne is not ill-humoured now. But she is, to a certain extent, enduring her lot. You know how that's done? "A little bit of stopping came out of my front tooth, and I had to go up to Kensington to get it seen to. Of course, I hadn't written, and Roots and Leaver kept me an hour and a half."
"What did he have to do?... painful?..."
"Oh no—nothing! He put some fresh stopping. Only a few minutes! What took you to Wimbledon?"
"Well—you see!—our excellent friend John Eldridge came and told me you were killed in the accident at Wimbledon Station...."
"Oh! Was there an accident?"
"Yes. Nobody we know in it. But two women killed and several injured. It was petroleum." He gave particulars of the accident, dwelling on the fact that the wrecked train was the one his wife would have been in if she had not been at the dentist's. "But I was at the dentist's," she said, with a certain implication in her voice of "So I don't see what you have to complain of."
However, it slowly dawned upon her that this was a case for recognition of the mercies of Providence. These were of two classes; one of which, known to her as Divine Forgiveness towards Sinners, on condition that they went to church, was an entirely different thing from certain good-natured impulses on the part of the Creator towards persons in difficulties, prompting special intervention on their behalf to save them from the blunders of Creation now that He had set it fairly going, and left it to shift for itself. He was, it appeared, very catholic in these impulses, as often as not giving non-churchgoers the benefit of His reserved rights of intervention in the caprices of the material universe. Challis believed that his wife used up all the theological liberality of which she was capable in ascribing let-offs of Jews, Turks, Heretics, and Infidels to special interventions which could only postpone for a very short time their Eternal Damnation at the hands of the intervening power.