Part 66 (1/2)

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 a.s.sent.

As the cup pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 pa.s.sed 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.”