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Their sister said nothing to them of her having seen him, and she accepted after a little, with a calmness that surprised herself, the idea that he had returned to town to denounce her. She believed this would make no difference now she had done what she had done. She had somehow a stiff faith in Mrs. Churchley.
One morning ten days after her scene with Godfrey, on coming back into the house shortly before lunch, she was met by Miss Flynn with the notification that a lady in the drawing-room had been waiting for her for some minutes. "A lady" suggested immediately Mrs. Churchley.
A near view, however, would have shown that Godfrey Chart hadn't taken so much trouble only to skim the surface. He looked deep into his sister's eyes. "What was it you said that morning to Mrs. Churchley?" She fixed them on the ground a moment, but at last met his own again. "If she has told you, why do you ask?" "She has told me nothing. I've seen for myself." "What have you seen?"
But personally she always felt the contagion, always conformed to the rush. Besides, she knew herself turn red now, flushed with a conviction that had come over her and that she wished not to show. Her father sat down on one of the big sofas with Mrs. Churchley; fortunately he was also a person with a presence that could hold its own.
She's to dine with us on the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come down." Adela stared. "To a dinner-party?" "It's not to be a dinner-party. I want them to know Mrs. Churchley." "Is there to be nobody else?" "Godfrey of course. A family party," he said with an assurance before which she turned cold. The girl asked her brother that evening if THAT wasn't tantamount to an announcement.
He appeared to agree to the general axiom that they didn't want a strange woman thrust into their life, but he found Mrs. Churchley "very jolly as a person to know." He had been to see her by himself he had been to see her three times. He in fact gave it out that he would make the most of her now; he should probably be so little in Seymour Street after these days.
Churchley, perched higher than ever, rode by without a recognition; but this didn't prevent Adela's going to her before the month was over. As on her great previous occasion she went in the morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted.
She had it from Godfrey before Mrs. Churchley left the house, when, after a brief interval, he followed her out of the drawing-room on her taking her sisters to bed. She was waiting for him at the door of her room. Her father was then alone with his fiancee the word was grotesque to Adela; it was already as if the place were her home.
The next morning it was the worst possibilities that seemed clearest; the only thing left with a tatter of dusky comfort being the ambiguity of Godfrey's charge that her own action had "done" for him. That was a matter by itself, and she racked her brains for a connecting link between Mrs. Churchley and Mrs. Godfrey.
One of the pictures she was looking at swam before her eyes. Mrs. Churchley, in the natural course, would have begun immediately to climb staircases. Adela could see the high bony shoulders and the long crimson tail and the universal coruscating nod wriggle their horribly practical way through the rest of the night. Therefore she MUST have had her reasons for detaining them.
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