Etta gasped and blushed crimson. “That would be very nice—but—but—I don’t think dad would quite like it.”
“Oh Lord!” cried Clementina, “I was forgetting those confounded conventions. They do complicate life so. And I suppose I can’t send you away with Tommy in the motor either. And now I come to think of it, I can’t go away to-night and leave you two to travel together to London to-morrow. What on earth are women put in the world for, especially young ones? They’re more worry than they’re worth. And if I left Tommy here and took you with me to Marseilles, you’d be as handy to travel with, in the circumstances, as a wedding-cake. I don’t know what to do with you.”
Etta suggested that the Jacksons—the friends whom she had visited the previous day—might take her in till Clementina came back. Indeed, they had invited her to stay with them.
“Go and telephone them at once,” said Clementina.
“You’ll have Uncle Ephraim as a travelling companion,” Tommy remarked as Etta was leaving them.
Clementina rubbed a distracted brow, not to the well-being of her front hair.
“Lord save us! He’ll be worse than Etta.”
“Poor dear Clementina,” he said, and turned away to administer help and counsel to his beloved in the complicated matter of the telephone.
Suddenly Clementina started to her feet. Perhaps Quixtus’s telegram had not been forwarded as hers had been. In this contingency it was her duty to let him know the unhappy news, and she must let him know at once. An ordinary woman would have sent Tommy round with the telegram. But Clementina; accustomed all her life long to act for herself, gave no thought to this possibility. She bolted out of the door of the hotel and made her way back to the tea-room.
The crowd had thinned, but Quixtus and his friends still lingered. Mrs. Fontaine, her elbows on the table, leaning her cheek against her daintily gloved hands, was engaged in earnest talk with him, to the exclusion of the other pair. Lady Louisa Mailing was eating pastry and drinking chocolate with an air of great enjoyment, while Huckaby, hands in pockets, leant back in his seat, a very bored Mephistopheles. He had exhausted his Martha’s conversation long ago, and he was weary of the eternal companionship. Why should not Faust have a turn at Martha now and again? Decidedly it was an unfair world. To add, also, to his present discomfort, the confused frame of mind in which he had originally introduced his patron to Mrs. Fontaine had gradually become more tangled. Clean living had grown more to his taste, abstinence from whisky much more simple to accomplish than his most remorseful dreams of reform had ever conceived. And that morning a letter from Billiter had filled him with disgust. Billiter upbraided him for silence; wanted to know what was going on, hinted that a dividend ought to be due by this time, and expressed, none too delicately, a suspicion of his partner’s business integrity. The cheap tavern-supplied note-paper offended against the nicety of Huckaby’s refined surroundings. The gross vulgarity of Billiter himself revolted him. A week had passed and Mrs. Fontaine had shown no signs of having accomplished her ends. He had not dared question her. He had begun; too; to loathe his part in the sordid plot. But that morning he had summoned up courage enough to say to Mrs. Fontaine;