The telephone bell suddenly pealed into the silence.
Muriel rose, but Mrs. Hammond waved her aside.
"No, no, I must go. We don't know what—what——"
She rustled from the room, and Muriel heard her quick light step in the hall and the click of the receiver as she lifted it. Upstairs a door opened and footsteps crossed the landing hurriedly. Connie too was listening.
"No, no—Yes. This is Rachel Hammond speaking. Mrs. Waring? Oh, good evening, Mrs. Waring. No, no. I'm so sorry. Not to-night. Yes. That's quite true. Connie came home last night for a short leave. What? No—no. Well"—only Connie and Muriel could detect the strain in that familiar flutter of laughter—"perhaps we may have some news for you soon, but I'm saying nothing now. Good night."
The whirring jar of the bell as she rang off snapped the tension of the house.
Muriel returned to her seat as Mrs. Hammond re-entered the room. Her quivering lips were almost as white as her drawn cheeks. She groped her way unsteadily to a chair. After a minute she said:
"That was Mrs. Waring. She wanted us to go and play bridge."
It seemed to Muriel incredible that people like Mrs. Waring and Mrs. Daunt should still be living in Marshington, playing bridge, chattering at the War Depot, and discussing the length of autumn skirts. For Miller's Rise that life had ended centuries ago, cut off by the startling anguish of Connie's wild confession. The echo of that storm still seemed to ring in Muriel's ears. Its violence had bruised and hurt her. She had been deafened by the raging of her father's voice, by Connie's shrill defiance and gusty tears. She could not bear to enter the drawing-room now lest she should see again her father standing by the fireplace, his great neck red and swollen with anger, his voice hurling at Connie those questions, unbearably coarse and brutal to Muriel's shrinking mind. She wanted to shut out for ever the remembrance of Connie's flaming, tear-stained face, and of her mother's terrible weeping as she lay crushed and broken, beaten out of her delicate composure into an abandonment that had tortured Muriel by its blind surrender to astonished pain.
And then slowly, from the terror and confusion, her mother's courage had risen above her agony. Muriel, watching her now as she sat fidgeting with the black tatting spindle, could feel again the effort of that re-assertion, until in the grey dreary hours of early morning, Mrs. Hammond had risen above her circumstances, quietly dominated the three of them, and had sent her husband off to Thraile to do the one thing left to save the Hammonds.