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It was settled so far as anything was settled that they were to let the flat, let Thorneytoft too, and go away from London, from England perhaps, to some Elysium to be agreed on by them both. It was to be a second honeymoon or was it a third? There was nothing like beginning all over again from the very beginning. They talked of the Riviera.
Miss Batchelor of Meriden would have proved a still more powerful ally than Sir Peter. She would have been as ambitious for him as he could have been for himself. By joining the estates of Thorneytoft and Meriden, Nevill Tyson, Esquire, would have become one of the largest land-owners in Leicestershire, when in all probability he would have known the joy of representing his county in Parliament.
She's not coming to Thorneytoft after all." "I didn't know she was expected." "Well, I wanted her to run down and entertain me a little, now that she can get away." "It would be rather a sacrifice for her to leave town just at the beginning of the season." "That's it. She has such hosts of engagements always going out somewhere. She tells me she thinks nothing of five theatres in one week."
He had tried his hand at comic journalism in London and at cattle-driving in Texas, and had been half-way to glory as a captain of irregulars in the Soudanese war. No, nobody was more surprised than himself when that mystic old man left him Thorneytoft. He thought he had chucked civilization for good. For good? But after his exciting life wouldn't he find civilization a little dull?
And when he came to stay at Thorneytoft for weeks at a time, familiarity with the little creature's moods only complicated the problem. It was about the middle of February, and Stanistreet had been down for a fortnight's hunting, when, in the morning of his last day, Tyson announced his intention of going up to town with him to-morrow.
It came over him with a sort of shock that this woman was Tyson's wife, irrevocably, until one or other of them died. And Tyson was not the sort of man to die for anybody's convenience but his own. At last they swayed into the courtyard at Thorneytoft. "Thank heaven we're alive!" he said, as he followed her into the house. Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on the threshold.
"This is very good of you, Miss Batchelor," said he. "I hope you'll come in and see my wife." Miss Batchelor played nervously with her card-case. "I I Would your wi would Mrs. Tyson care to see me?" He smiled again. "I think I can answer for that." And to her own intense surprise, for the first and last time Miss Batchelor crossed the threshold of Thorneytoft.
He had done all that she supposed, and more. First of all, he drank a little more than was good for him; this happened occasionally now. Then he sat down and wrote what he thought was a very terse and biting letter to Stanistreet, in which he said: "You needn't call. You will not find either of us at home at Ridgmount Gardens from May to August, nor at Thorneytoft from August to May.
If he had been nothing to her but the man who knew more about Tyson than anybody else? She had always had a way of making him talk about Tyson, while he seemed to himself to be most engagingly egotistic. And he had once thought that Mrs. There was this summer, and that moment in the library at Thorneytoft Mrs. Nevill Tyson was beyond him. And he had been three years trying to understand her.
It it makes me ill." And forthwith she went off into a fit of hysterics. It was at this crisis of the baby's fate that Miss Batchelor, of all people, took it into her head to call. After all, Tyson was Nevill Tyson, Esquire, of Thorneytoft, and his wife had been somewhere very near death's door. People who would have died rather than call for any other reason, called "to inquire."
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