Glad of anything to divert the current of her thoughts, she snatches up a small fur cap in the hall, which rests becomingly on Eleanor's wealth of waving hair. Flinging a long red cloak around her, she slips out of the house, and rings at the widow's door.
"I hope she is alone. I don't feel in the mood to compass Bertie's inane conversation," thinks Mrs. Roche as the flaxen maid shows her in.
The twilight has gathered, but there is no lamp, as Giddy rustles forward in a lavender tea-gown to greet Eleanor.
"You are a very bad child," she says holding up her finger, "but we've found you out, and shown you up most shockingly. What right have you to break hearts, as if they were only bric-à-brac, and say 'Not at home' when you were probably gourmandising over the huge Buzzard cake we ordered in town?"
Eleanor cannot speak, for Carol Quinton rises, and looks reproachfully into her eyes. She feels like a hunted stag, and yet she is glad—relieved.
"There! now you are in a hole," continues Giddy, laughing, "with no time to invent a plausible excuse. But come and sit down and ask forgiveness. I dare say Carol will get over it."
As yet Eleanor has not spoken. She walks like one in a trance to the quaint old chair Mrs. Mounteagle draws forward. She sits down mechanically and gazes at the colours in the carpet, just as she did once before at the Butterflies' Club.
"What a poor little world it is!" she thinks, "just like a muddy, narrow lane, through which its puppets drive or run, with the dirt thrown up in their faces at every turn."
"Come! do not look so glum over it," coos Giddy, removing Eleanor's cloak. "Carol knows as well as I do what a row you have been in, and how rusty Mr. Roche has turned. We are both most terribly sorry for you. I am sure I don't know how you stand him. It does so remind me of my late husband, from whom I was separated by mutual agreement two years before his death. Our quarrels began much in the same way. I preferred a will of my own, and meant to have it. He would have treated me like the chickens cooped up in the yard—a useful addition to his table, only their part was the most enviable. I should not have minded being cooked and roasted, for there my sorrows would have ceased."
"Death must be very pleasant," says Eleanor slowly, her head turning lightly to the alluring charms of suicide.