When she had finished the second cup she was feeling herself again. She really couldn’t think how she had come to be so upset. She thought that she had been very stupid. What she would do now was to go back to the gallery and ask the attendant about the men. Even if they had left, he might know something about them. She paid her bill and walked back along the way that she had come.
When she came to the gallery she had to make it clear that she had no intention of paying a second time to go in. It went against her conscience to ask whether she had dropped a handkerchief on or near the seat from which she had contemplated Wilfrid’s nasty picture, but it would have gone against it even more to pay a second entrance fee, a thing which would come under the heading of sinful waste.
Mr. Pegler said no, he hadn’t seen any handkerchief.
“It was the next seat to where the two gentlemen were. About half an hour ago-I don’t know if you noticed them.”
Mr. Pegler was a little rosy-faced man with a flow of conversation. So far from resenting Miss Paine’s hypothetical handkerchief, he welcomed it with enthusiasm.
“Now if that isn’t a funny thing, your mentioning those two gentlemen, miss! Proper interested in you one of them was, and you can take it from me that’s a fact.”
Paulina had to take a grip on herself.
“Interested in me?”
“Well, miss, it was this way. One of them he got up and went out, and after a bit the other one got up too. Walking along looking at the pictures he was, and all of a sudden he come to the one that’s marked ‘Sold’, and the spit and image of you, miss, if you don’t mind my saying so, and I couldn’t help thinking whether it was done from you, and glad to get a chance to ask you if it was.”
“Yes, it was done from me.”
He beamed.
“I thought as much! The only thing-if you’ll excuse me, miss-the gentleman as painted it, Mr. Moray, he was here a bit earlier on with the gentleman that’s bought it. Well, what he said was that the lady he painted it from was deaf. Stone-deaf was what he said, and so be there was a good light, he said, no one would credit it, the way you could do this lip-reading-not unless they saw it. Well, if you’ll pardon me, that’s a thing that interests me a lot on account of my daughter’s youngest. Shocking deaf she is and getting worse, and they said it would help her if she learnt this lip-reading, so when I seen you I thought I’d ask you about it, only you went out so sudden.”
Paulina found herself embarked on advising Mr. Pegler about his grand-daughter. Oh, yes, of course the child must take up lip-reading, and at once-the sooner the better.
“It was much harder for me than it would be for a child. Children learn very quickly.”
It was a little time before Mr. Pegler came back to the gentleman who had been so much interested, but he got there in the end.
“I took the liberty of telling him what Mr. Moray said about you not hearing anything but how quick you was with the lip-reading. ‘What!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say she could be standing over there’-and he points back to the seat what he’d been sitting on- ‘and that she could tell what you and me was talking about just by looking at us!’ ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘it’s funny you should put it that way, for that’s just the way Mr. Moray put it -him as painted the picture-when he was talking to the gentleman as bought it. Pointed to that very seat he did and said, ‘I give you my word,’ he said, ‘if she was there and we was here, and you was looking her way, she’d read the words off of your lips as fast as you said them.’ You wouldn’t credit how interested he was, miss, when I told him that.”
Paulina found no difficulty at all in believing him. She went out of the gallery and began to walk towards her bus stop. All the way home she was thinking what she had better do, and the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she couldn’t cope with it alone.
She came in at her front door just as David and Sally were going out. She thought it was as if they were in another world-a safe, pleasant one where young people could meet and be happy. It wasn’t a world that had ever come her way, but she liked to think that Sally and David were in it. They went by her with a pleasant word, and then suddenly she had her hand on David Moray’s arm and was speaking to him.
“It was so kind of your cousins the Charles Morays to ask me to their party the other day.”
He said, “It wasn’t kind of them at all. They wanted to meet you.”
“Because of your picture?”
“No, because of you.”
She felt herself flushing with pleasure. But she mustn’t keep them- She said in a hurry,
“I was so much interested-there was someone I met there. I wonder if Mrs. Moray would think me troublesome if I were to ring up and ask her for the address. And I was wondering if by any chance you could remember the number.”
He said, “Four two’s in a row and the same exchange as this. Would you like me to ring up for you?”
She was scrupulous.
“I mustn’t delay you.”
“It won’t take a minute. We’ll go back to Sally’s room.”
Margaret Moray was in. Her voice came pleasantly along the wire. David said,
“Miss Paine wants to speak to you. She’ll say what she wants to, and I’ll repeat your answers so that she can see them. Now, Miss Paine-”
Paulina took the receiver.
“Mrs. Moray, I wonder if you would be kind enough to give me the address of your friend Miss Maud Silver-”
Chapter 4
MISS SILVER was reading a letter from her niece Ethel Burkett, the wife of a bank manager in the Midlands. The subject of the letter was a distressing one, the foolish and frivolous conduct of Ethel’s sister Gladys Robinson, who had taken the unjustifiable step of leaving an excellent husband whom she complained of finding dull.
“As if anyone in their senses expects their husband to be exciting!” wrote Mrs. Burkett. “And she doesn’t say where she is, or what she is doing, so all we can hope and trust is that she is alone, and that she hasn’t done anything which Andrew would find it impossible to forgive. Because what is she going to live on!” There was a good deal more in this strain.