What could have transpired? And why had my friend’s movements been so exceedingly erratic of late, if he had not been following some clue? Would that clue lead him to the truth, I wondered? Or was he still suspicious of Ethelwynn’s guilt?
Puzzled by this vague note, and wondering what had occurred, and whether the trip to Bath was in connection with it, I made a hasty toilet and drove in a hansom to the Hennikers’.
Mrs. Henniker met me in the drawing-room, just as gushing and charming as ever. She was one of those many women in London who seek to hang on to the skirts of polite society by reason of a distant connexion being a countess—a fact of which she never failed to remind the stranger before half-an-hour’s acquaintance. She found it always a pleasant manner in which to open a conversation at dinner, dance, or soirée: “Oh! do you happen to know my cousin, Lady Nassington?” She never sufficiently realised it as bad form, and therefore in her own circle was known among the women, who jeered at her behind her back, as “The Cousin of Lady Nassington.” She was daintily dressed, and evidently just come in from visiting, for she still had her hat on when she entered.
“Ah!” she cried, with her usual buoyant air. “You truant! We’ve all been wondering what had become of you. Busy, of course! Always the same excuse! Find something fresh. You used it a fortnight ago to refuse my invitation to take pot-luck with us.”
I laughed at her unconventional greeting, replying, “If I say something fresh it must be a lie. You know, Mrs. Henniker, how hard I’m kept at it, with hospital work and private practice.”
“That’s all very well,” she said, with a slight pout of her well-shaped mouth—for she was really a pretty woman, even though full of airs and caprices. “But it doesn’t excuse you for keeping away from us altogether.”
“I don’t keep away altogether,” I protested. “I’ve called now.”
She pulled a wry face, in order to emphasise her dissatisfaction at my explanation, and said:
“And I suppose you are prepared to receive castigation? Ethelwynn has begun to complain because people are saying that your engagement is broken off.”
“Who says so?” I inquired rather angrily, for I hated all the tittle-tattle of that little circle of gossips who dawdle over the tea-cups of Redcliffe Square and its neighbourhood. I had attended a good many of them professionally at various times, and was well acquainted with all their ways and all their exaggerations. The gossiping circle in flat-land about Earl’s Court was bad enough, but the Redcliffe Square set, being slightly higher in the social scale, was infinitely worse.