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“Shall I ask him?”

“I tell you he can’t bear to hear her name!”

“But he doesn’t know why she has left him.”

Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. “Why—what on earth—what possible difference would that make?”

Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. “Ah—if you don’t see!” she murmured.

He sank back into his seat with a groan. “Good heavens, Maria, how you torture me! I see enough as it is—I see too much of the cursed business!”

She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her hand on his shoulder.

“There’s one thing you’ve never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself would do now—for the child—if she could.”

He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the instinctive shrinking of an aged grief. XLI

AMHERST, Cicely’s convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell that the little girl’s progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he returned to his father-in-law’s for a Sunday.

He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter—a talk of which Mrs. Ansell’s letter to him had been the direct result. She had promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word, trusting to circumstances to speak for her.

Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely’s illness, had formed the habit of dropping in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone. Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.

He met it with a discouraged gesture. “No great change—Amherst finds her less well than when he was here before.”

“He’s upstairs with her?”

“Yes—she seems to want him.”

Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups, Mr. Langhope added with an effort: “I’ve spoken to him—told him what you said.”

She looked up quickly.

“About the child’s wish,” he continued. “About her having written to his wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered.”

He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add half-reproachfully: “I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought.”

“Yes?”

“That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white.” The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered: “Well?”

“Well—he doesn’t know where she is himself.”

“Doesn’t know?”

“They’re separated—utterly separated. It’s as I told you: he could hardly name her.”

Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her companion’s face.

“I wonder what reason she could have given him?” she murmured at length.

“For going? He loathes her, I tell you!”

“Yes—but how did she make him?”

He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. “Upon my soul, you seem to forget!”

“No.” She shook her head with a half smile. “I simply remember more than you do.”

“What more?” he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting hand.

“What does all that matter—if, now that we need her, we can’t get her?”

He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: “You think it’s going to be very bad for the child, then?”

Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. “One can hardly set the police after her–-!”

“No; we’re powerless,” he groaned in assent.

As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she moved back to the sofa without a word.

 

On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely’s room.

Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on Amherst’s side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now that Bessy’s death had given her back the attributes with which his fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his wife.

Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.

She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed, with a glance through the panes of the hall door: “But I must be off—I’m on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark.”

He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: “Won’t you come up? There’s one thing more I want to say.”

A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the shining steel cage of the lift.

In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own tone: “I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr. Langhope.”

Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law’s health had been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern, of late, had been for Cicely.

“You think him less well?” he enquired.

She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.

“I think him extremely unhappy.”

Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places, and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.