"May I leave you alone for a few moments, Lady Challis?" says Judith, going. "Please step in here till my mother returns, and sit down." That is, into the little room off the landing. Judith goes upstairs quickly; and Samuel, always on the watch, officiates as pilot.
Lady Arkroyd walked back into the drawing-room. She looked despair before trusting herself to speech, and the action of her hands laid an imaginary case for despair before the two gentlemen, who stopped talking to hear its spoken particulars. Her husband encouraged revelation by saying "Well?" interrogatively.
"Oh, my dear, what is to be done? It's the Deceased Wife's Sister! I wish you would come."
The Baronet gives the slightest of whistles. "Where have you got her?" he asks.
"My dear, she's in hysterics!"
"Yes—but where?"
"In the front hall. And Judith is there with her!"
"I say, we'd better go." Thus the Baronet to the Rector, who assents without reserve. Observe that this colloquy has gone on in undertones. Not that anyone could hear—they might have shouted, for that matter—but to endorse the tension of the situation.
Arriving in the hall, and seeing first the place where Judith had been standing, her mother felt a sense of relief. Her absence made the position easier to deal with. But—where was the Deceased Wife's Sister? Samuel explained. He had shown the lady into the mezzanina room, as directed. Samuel felt proud of his Italian, over this.
Marianne had not been sorry to be alone again for a moment, after her first effort of self-announcement. She looked out through the window over the rounded slopes, thickly wooded enough to seem a stretch of forest; with the little groups of roe-deer in the glades the beech-woods grudged them, in their ambition to cover the whole land. She saw the wide level lawns, clothed with the grass of centuries, dreaming of the music of bygone scythes, before the days of mowing-machines and their economies of power no man stinted then; the peacocks walking with precision, and satisfied that they were appreciated; the beds ablaze with asters and marigolds, and dahlias, and standard roses still blooming, and proud of their little tickets that told what variety they were. She saw all these, and out beyond them the smoke-cloud of the great manufacturing centre, with its confidence of one day gobbling up the park and its wood and warren, vert and venison, and getting at its coal, and using it up to make steel armour-plates, that shall send other armour-plates to the bottom of the sea. Unless, indeed, civilization collapses; whereof it is not proper form to say—the sooner the better!