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Half-way down the stairs he saw his overcoat on the hall-stand beckoning to him and offering release. Then he heard the bedroom door and his wife's footsteps. "Edward Henry!" "Well?" He stopped and looked up inimically at her face, which overhung the banisters. It was the face of a woman outraged in her most profound feelings, but amazingly determined to be sweet. "What do you think of it?"
Nothing but a cry from her father could have prevented her from taking it up and setting it upon her head. The act was her defiance. She was determined. As one deaf and blind, she went out of the kitchen, and to the hall-stand, fumbling there for her hatpins. She pinned her hat as deliberately as she might have done in leaving the house any morning. Her pale face was set. She had flung the gage.
Cecilia picked up the inky cloth, and went out. Her stepmother was standing by the hall-stand, apparently intent on examining Wilfred's straw hat. She spoke in a low tone as the girl passed her. "I wish you did not find so much pleasure in gossiping with servants, Cecilia. It is such a bad example for Avice. I have spoken about it to you before." Cecilia did not answer.
"Doris, you are mad!" he protested. "Wait a minute, my dear girl just a minute." "I don't care! I will know!" Mr. Wynne turned and picked up a heavy cane from the hall-stand, and brought it down on the transmitter with all his strength. The delicate mechanism jangled and tingled, then the front fell off at their feet. The diaphragm dropped and rolled away.
The manners and state of a family that has industrially risen combine the spectacular grandeur of the caste to which it has climbed with the ease and freedom of the caste which it has quitted. "Such a surprise!" said the voice. Nellie appeared, rosy. Denry threw his new motoring cap hastily on to the hall-stand. No! He did not hope that Nellie would see it. He hoped that she would not see it.
In the next breath he stepped out of the room and tip-toed into the passage. He retreated to the far end, near the street door, and stood behind the coats that hung on the hall-stand. At that moment his wife came into the passage, holding a candle. She was red-eyed with weeping, and looked frail. "Did YOU leave the parlour door open?" she asked of Millicent, suspiciously.
He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for emergencies, a book of court plaster.
He rang the bell; was admitted by your father, and, leaving his hat and stick in the hall-stand as he had often done before, the two went upstairs to the library. There was an angry interview, Holymead accusing your father of having wronged him and demanding satisfaction. My own opinion is that there was an irregular sort of duel. Each of them fired one shot.
Somewhere in the hall between us crouched the man I had taken for Willie, crouched with a revolver in his right hand. The door was still open, I knew, and I could hear Willie fumbling on the hall-stand for matches. I called out something incoherent about not striking a light; but Willie, whistling softly to show how cool he was, struck a match.
Daisy did not receive many letters except on business, and as these usually came in the morning she did not think to ask if the postman had left her anything; and so it was not until her mother had retired and she was about going to her own room that she saw a letter lying on the hall-stand.
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