"They say she's never been up there to stay since he came home," Daisy remarked with the confident knowledge of the already married. "Of course I was always sure that it would never come to anything and I still don't believe he'll marry her. A foreigner——"
"She's not," protested Muriel.
"Oh, well, she's half French or something, isn't she? Anyway, I'm sure she'd never do for Godfrey. Now poor Phyllis—— Really, it is terrible, isn't it? Ever since he came home, she's looking so ill and pale, though I do think that she's a little fool to wear her heart on her sleeve like that——"
A pleasurable pride lifted for a moment the depression of Muriel's mood. She at least evidently did not share in the folly of Phyllis Marshall Gurney, yet as she said good-bye at the garden gate of Daisy's little villa her depression returned to her again. It accompanied her on the walk homeward, blinding her to the clear tracery of budding trees across the sky, to the silver serenity of the spring evening. She thought, "Connie's baby would have been three years old now. They might at least have left me the satisfaction of being an aunt." She thought, "What on earth shall I do when I get home? Read? All books are the same—about beautiful girls who get married or married women who fall in love with their husbands. In books things always happen to people. Why doesn't somebody write a book about someone to whom nothing ever happens—like me?"
She thought, "If only I'd done what Mr. Vaughan suggested about St. Catherine's Home, I'd have the accounts to do this evening. Mother says that Mrs. Cartwright's got the tradesman's bills into an awful mess. But it's not the sort of thing that young girls do. Oh, no! Men hate to think of girls being mixed up in that sort of thing! O God, O God, what am I going to do! How much does Mother know about Eric? How long can I bear living in the same house as those two, knowing what I know, guessing what they know, and hearing them lie and lie and lie?
"I must be sensible. What could Mother do about Connie but pretend that she knows nothing? Did she know about Eric, though, before she made Connie marry Ben? There was something between them. How much did she guess? Oh, what is the use of going all over this again? I must think about something else. If I don't think about something else I shall go mad. What's the good, what's the good? What else is there to think about? The tennis club opening? The Nursing Association, the Marshington people? What shall I do—having nothing to think about, and nobody's going to marry me, and I'm here always, always? How many years? Three since I left Thraile? Then I shall probably live another fifty."
She tried as always, to reason herself back into sanity. "Even if I can't love Mother any more as I used to; even if I know that she's calculating and hard and insincere, at least Father needs me. He has come to like me a little more—to know me." But Muriel knew this to be at least uncertain. When she opened the door of Miller's Rise, she felt the atmosphere of the house close in upon her. She heard through the morning-room door her father's voice, "But, look here, Rachel, for the Lord's sake!" And her mother's, gently complaining, "Oh, of course, Arthur, I know. You always thought of the girls before you thought of me. You always preferred to have Muriel do things for you——"
"Oh, by gad, this is too bad! Muriel's a good lass enough, but you know it's nothing to do with that. A husband's and wife's income are clumped together for taxation, and I'm damned if I'll let this rotten Government fleece me right and left. Muriel will get it anyway when we're gone, she might as well have a bit now—I'll tie up the capital so that no rascal can marry her for her money——"
"Oh, I don't think that you need fear that she'll marry, and it's all very well putting it down to the income tax, but you know as well as I do——"
Muriel put down her umbrella with a clatter on the hall table. She went into the sitting-room to find her father standing in flushed exasperation near the mantelpiece, her mother sewing with indignant concentration at the table, and Aunt Beatrice, ignored as completely as the carpet, crocheting doilies in the window.