Things had not fallen out at The Chase that morning as Godfrey Pavely had supposed. After breakfast Laura, still in a kind of stupor of pain and indignation, had gone into the garden. She had not been there a quarter of an hour when Mrs. Tropenell, who so seldom came to The Chase, had suddenly appeared, walking with stately, leisurely steps over the grass, to tell her of Oliver's and Gillie's coming departure for the Continent.
It was Mrs. Tropenell who had proposed sending that note to Godfrey, but Godfrey, who so little understood his wife, either for good or evil, was right in his belief that she would not have allowed her plans to be affected by his answer. At once Laura had determined to go to London, whether Godfrey gave his consent or no. Yet she was relieved when there came to her from Freshley the news that her husband's answer to Mrs. Tropenell's request was in the affirmative.
The message was given to her over the telephone by Oliver Tropenell, and in giving it he used the allusive form of words which come naturally when a man knows that what he says may be overheard: "Mother has just had a note saying that it is quite all right. So we propose to call for you in time to get the five minutes to one from Langford Junction. Does that give you enough time?" And she had exclaimed, "Oh, yes, yes! I'm quite ready now."
To that he had made no answer, and she had felt a little chill at the heart. Oliver's voice had sounded curiously cold—but then the telephone does sometimes alter voices strangely.
Those eight days in London! Laura was often to live through each of those long days during the dull weeks which followed her return home. Yet, when she did look back on that time, she had to admit that she had not been really happy, though the first hours had been filled with a sort of excited triumph and sense of victory. It was such a relief, too, to be away from Godfrey, and spared, even if only for a few days, the constant, painful irritation of his presence.
But her brother, for whose sake, after all, she was in London, jarred on her perpetually. For one thing, Gillie was in extravagant, almost unnaturally high spirits, set on what he called "having a good time," and his idea of a good time was, as Oliver once grimly remarked, slightly monotonous.
Gillie's good time consisted in an eager round of business interviews, culminating each evening in a rich dinner at one of the smart grill-rooms which were then the fashion, followed by three hours of a musical comedy, and finally supper at some restaurant, the more expensive the better.
To his sister, each evening so spent seemed a dreary waste of precious time. For in the daytime the two ladies, who had taken rooms in an old-fashioned hotel in a small street off Piccadilly, saw very little of Gillie and Oliver. Gillie had insisted that Oliver and he should go and stay at what he considered the smartest and most modern hotel in London, and though the strangely assorted quartette always lunched together, the two partners had a good deal to do each morning and most afternoons.
To Mrs. Tropenell's surprise Oliver apparently had no wish to be with Laura alone. Was it because he was afraid of giving himself away to his coarse-minded, jovial partner? Oliver looked stern, abstracted, and, when at the play, bored.
She admitted another possible reason for his almost scrupulous avoidance of Laura. With regard to the bitter feud between the brothers-in-law, Oliver had spoken to his mother with curious apathy. Perhaps he was honestly desirous of not taking sides. But on the whole Mrs. Tropenell swung more often to her first theory, and this view was curiously confirmed on the one Sunday spent by them in town.
Gillie, grumbling, a good deal at the dulness of the English Sunday, had motored off early to the country to spend the day with some people whom he had known in Mexico. And late that morning Oliver suddenly suggested that Laura and he should go out for a turn in the Green Park—only a stone's-throw from the rooms the two ladies were sharing.
And that hour, which was perhaps fraught with bigger circumstance than any one, save Oliver himself, was ever to know, did remain in Laura Pavely's memory as a strange and, in a sense, a delicious oasis, in her long, arid stay in London. For, as the two walked and talked intimately together in a solitude all the greater because peopled by the indifferent and unknown, they seemed to come nearer to one another—and to meet, for the first time, in an atmosphere of clarity and truth. Laura, perhaps because she had felt, during these last few days, so desperately lonely in a spiritual sense, talked more freely, albeit in a more detached way, to her devoted, considerate, and selfless friend, than she had ever been able to bring herself to do to any other human being.
For a while, after they had turned and begun pacing together under the now yellowing plane trees, neither of them spoke. Then Oliver said abruptly, "So all our schemes have vanished into air—I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too," she said. "I always knew that Godfrey would never allow me to go away with Gillie, but I never, never thought that even he could behave as he did to my brother the other day——"
There was a sound of suppressed passion and revolt in her voice that he had never heard there before. It touched a chord in his own heart, but all he said, slowly, was, "I suppose Gillie irritated him."
"No, I don't think so. There wasn't time for Gillie to do anything, for Godfrey at once refused to shake hands with him. That's how it began."
"Gillie ought to have written first. My mother begged him not to take Godfrey by surprise——"
"Your mother is always right," she said in a low voice. "I've never known her wrong yet, though her advice isn't always easy to follow, Oliver."
"I'm afraid she was right this time, anyhow."
"I know she was."
There fell between them a long, pregnant silence. And then Oliver said, in a low, moved voice, "I'm afraid that this last business has made you very unhappy, Laura?"
She answered, "Yes—foolishly so. I ought not to have been surprised, for by this time I know Godfrey so well." And she believed herself to be speaking the truth.
"It's not his fault," she went on painfully, "that he has nothing in common with me and with my brother, different as we, too, are the one from the other. Gillie and I might have been born on different planets from Godfrey."
Laura had not meant to speak of Godfrey to Oliver. Indeed, she had formed the resolution never to do so again. But somehow, to-day, she felt as if she might break that salutary rule.
His next words seemed to prove to her that she could trust him to understand, for, "Yes," he said quietly, "you're right there, Laura. You and Godfrey have nothing in common between you, and that being so, I suppose there's nothing to be done?"
"No, there's nothing to be done," she repeated hopelessly. And then once more she broke her wise resolution: "If it hadn't been for Alice, I should, even now, be tempted to do what I so nearly did at the time that Godfrey and Gillie"—she hesitated—"had their first misunderstanding."
"What you nearly did then, Laura?" There came an eager, questioning thrill in her companion's strained voice.
"Yes—" Why shouldn't she unburden her heart for once? "Yes, at the time of that first quarrel between my brother and my husband, I nearly left Godfrey. But for your mother, I should have done so. Alice was a tiny baby then, and I didn't realise, as I realise now, what an awful responsibility a woman takes on herself in breaking up a child's happy home. Only your mother stopped my doing it, and the fact"—she looked at him with a soundless depth of sadness in her face—"the fact that Gillie didn't really want me to go and live with him. Of course it was long before the question of his going to Mexico was raised."
"And have you never regretted that you did not carry out that purpose?"
Oliver Tropenell was looking straight before him as he asked the dangerous question. They were walking, slowly, slowly, along the broad path which runs just within the railings along the park side of Piccadilly. Between twelve and one on an autumn Sunday morning this path is generally deserted.
She did not answer at once, and he said quickly, "Forgive me! I ought not to have asked you that."
"Yes," she said again, "you can ask me anything you like,