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It seemed to her that she was once more in the Park Lane drawing-room; the familiar Morris papers and Burne-Jones drawings surrounded her; and she and Elizabeth Tranmore sat, hand in hand, talking of William a William once more free, after much folly and suffering, to reconstruct his life....
There was a younger sister, who was known to have married imprudently, and against her father's wishes, some five or six years before this. Catharine was poor, the wife of a clergyman with young children. Lady Tranmore sometimes wondered whether Mary was quite as good to her as she might be. She herself sent Catharine various presents in the course of the year for the children.
Her face, in spite of the red and swollen eyes, was alive with fun, and Ashe's laugh reflected hers. The domesticity, the intimate affection of the scene before these things Elizabeth Tranmore stood gasping. "Dearest mother!" cried Ashe, starting up. Kitty turned. At sight of Lady Tranmore she hung back; her smiles departed; her lip quivered.
The preceding winter had been marked, first by a mad folly of table-turning involving the pursuit of a particular medium whose proceedings had ultimately landed him in the dock; then by a headlong passion for hunting, accompanied by a series of new flirtations, each more unseemly than its predecessor, as it seemed to Lady Tranmore. Afterwards during the general election a political phase!
Lady Tranmore turned in astonishment. She had expected Mary's assent to her original remark as a matter of course. Mary's old flirtation with Geoffrey Cliffe, and the long breach between them which had followed it, were things well known to her. They had coincided, moreover, with her own dropping of the man whom for various reasons she had come to regard as unscrupulous and unsafe.
"They should behave a little more considerately to me if they want to get me to amuse their guests for them." At this moment Margaret French re-entered the room. Lady Tranmore turned to her with a gesture of distress. "Oh, Margaret knows," said Kitty. "I told her yesterday." "The Parhams?" said Margaret. Kitty nodded.
"I see you both think me a dreamer of dreams!" "Nay, dear friend!" said Lady Tranmore, with the melancholy smile which lent still further beauty to the refined austerity of her face; "these things seem possible to you, because you are the soul of goodness " "And a pious old fool to boot!" said the Dean, impatiently. "But I am willing like St. Paul and my betters to be a fool for Christ's sake.
"Oh, Harry; is he there?" said Kitty, in another voice, perceiving the child behind his grandmother's dress as he sat on the floor, where Lady Tranmore had just deposited him.
Meanwhile, down-stairs, Ashe himself was wrestling with another phase of the same situation. Lady Tranmore's note had said: "I shall be with you almost immediately after you receive this, as I want to catch you before you go to the Foreign Office." Accordingly, they were in the library, Ashe on the defensive, Lady Tranmore nervous, embarrassed, and starting at a sound.
It was as if, like the prince in the fairy tale, some iron band round her heart had given way. She seemed to dance through the house; she devoured her child with kisses; and she was even willing sometimes to let William tell her what his mother suspected of the progress of Mary's affair with Geoffrey Cliffe, though she carefully avoided speaking directly to Lady Tranmore about it.
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