"Gentlemen in the room would be a very different thing," Miss Henderson supported her.
"I'll take a second cup, Mrs. Bullivant, if you please," said Miss Delmege with dignity.
"There!" exclaimed Miss Henderson.
Miss Marsh had suddenly begun to cry.
Mrs. Bullivant hastily poured out more tea, and said uncertainly: "Come, come!"
"There's no call for any one to cry, that I can see," observed Miss Delmege, still detached, but in a tone of uneasiness.
"The fact is, I'm not myself today," sobbed Miss Marsh.
"What is it?" said Gracie sympathetically. She slipped a friendly hand into her room-mate's.
"I had a letter which upset me this morning. A great friend of mine, who's been wounded—a boy I know most awfully well."
"Why didn't you tell me, dear?" asked Miss Henderson. "I didn't even know you had a boy out there."
"Oh, not a feawncy—only a chum," said Miss Marsh, still sniffing.
"Is he bad, dear?"
"A flesh-wound in the arm, and something about trench feet."
"That's a nice slow thing, and they'll send him to England to get well," prophesied Grace.
Miss Delmege rose from her seat.
"I'm sorry you've been feeling upset," she said to Miss Marsh. "It seems rather strange you didn't say anything sooner, but I'm sorry about it."
"Thank you," Miss Marsh replied with a gulp. "If I've been rather sharp in my manner today, I hope you won't think I meant anything. This has rather upset me."
Miss Delmege bowed slightly, and Grace, fearing an anticlimax, begged Miss Marsh to come up to bed.
The final amende was made next morning, when Miss Delmege, in a buff-coloured drapery known as "my fawn peignwaw," came to the door and asked for admittance.
Grace opened the door, and Miss Delmege said, in a voice even more distinct than usual: "I know Miss Marsh was tired last night, dear, so I've brought her a cup of our early tea."
VII
"Mother, are you coming to the Canteen again tomorrow? You remember what a rush it was last Monday, and it'll be just as bad again."
"No, Char, I am not," was the unvarnished reply of Lady Vivian.
Char compressed her lips and sighed. She would have been almost as much disappointed as surprised if her mother had suddenly expressed an intention of appearing regularly at the Canteen, but she knew that Miss Bruce was looking at her with an admiring and compassionate gaze.
Sir Piers, who substituted chess for billiards on Sunday evenings because he thought it due to the servants to show that the Lord's Day was respected at Plessing, looked up uneasily.
"You're not going out again tomorrow, eh, my dear? I missed our game sadly the other night."
"No, it's all right; I'm not going again."
Joanna never raised her voice very much, but Sir Piers always heard what she said. It made Char wonder sometimes, half irritably and half ashamedly, whether he could not have heard other people, had he wanted to. The overstrain from which she herself was quite unconsciously suffering made her nervously impatient of the old man's increasing slowness of perception.
"And where has Char been all this afternoon? I never see you about the house now," Sir Piers said, half maunderingly, half with a sort of bewilderment that was daily increasing in his view of small outward events.
"I've been at my work," said Char, raising her voice, partly as a vent to her own feelings. "I go into the office on Sunday afternoons always, and a very good thing I do, too. They were making a fearful muddle of some telegrams yesterday."
"Telegrams? You can't send telegrams on a Sunday, child; they aren't delivered. I don't like you to go to this place on Sundays, either. Joanna, my dear, we mustn't allow her to do that."
Char cast up her eyes in a sort of desperation, and went into the further half of the drawing-room, where Miss Bruce sat, just hearing her mother say gently: "Look, Piers, I shall take your castle."
"Brucey," said Char, "I think they'll drive me mad. I know my work is nothing, really—such a tiny, infinitesimal part of a great whole—but if I could only get a little sympathy. It does seem so extraordinary, when one has been working all day, giving one's whole self to it all, and then to come back to this sort of atmosphere!"
Miss Bruce was perhaps the only person with whom Char was absolutely unreserved. In younger days Miss Bruce had been her adoring governess, and the old relations still existed between them. Char knew that Miss Bruce had always thought Lady Vivian's management of her only child terribly injudicious, and that in the prolonged antagonism between herself and her mother Miss Bruce's silent loyalty had always ranged itself on Char's side.
"It's very hard on you, my dear," she sighed. "But I have been afraid lately—have you noticed, I wonder?"
"What?"
"Sir Piers seems to me to be failing; he is so much deafer, so much more dependent on Lady Vivian."
"He's always that," said Char. "I think it's only the beginning of the winter, Brucey. He always feels the cold weather."
But a very little while later Miss Bruce's view received unexpected corroboration.
Three Sundays later, when the weather had grown colder than ever, and Char was, as usual, spending the afternoon and evening at the Depôt, Mrs. Willoughby paid a call at Plessing.
She was followed into the room, with almost equal unwillingness, by her husband and a small, immensely stout Pekinese dog, with bulging eyes and a quick, incessant bark that only Mrs. Willoughby's voice could dominate.
"Darling Joanna!" she shrieked. "Puffles, wicked, wicked boy, be quiet! Isn't this an invasion? But my Lewis did so want—I shall smack 'oo if 'oo isn't quiet directly. Do you mind this little brown boy, who goes everywhere with his mammy? I knew you'd love him if you saw him—but such a noise! Lewis, tell this naughty Puff his mother can't hear herself speak."
"Down, sir!" said Lewis, in tones which might have quelled a mastiff with hydrophobia.
Puff waddled for refuge to his mistress, who immediately gathered him on to her lap as she sank on to the sofa.
"Did 'oo daddy speak in a big rough voice, and frighten the poor little manikin?" she inquired solicitously. "Isn't he rather twee, Joanna?"
"I've not seen it before," said Joanna, in tones more civil than enthusiastic.
"It!" screamed Lesbia. "She calls 'oo it, my Puffles! as though he wasn't the sweetest little brown boy in the whole world. It! You've hurt his little feelings too dreadfully, my dear—look at him sulking!"
Puff had composed himself into a sort of dribbling torpor.
"That dog doesn't get enough exercise," said Major Willoughby suddenly, fixing his eyes upon his hostess.
"Surely it—he—is too small to require a great deal," said Lady Vivian languidly. Lap-dogs bored her very much indeed, and she turned away her eyes after taking one rather disgusted look at the recumbent Puff through her eyeglasses.
"Train up a dog in the way it should go. Now, this little fellah—you'd hardly believe it, Lady Vivian, if I were to tell you the difference in him after he's had a good run over the Common."
"Lewis!" cried Lesbia, opening her eyes to an incredible extent, as was her wont whenever she wished to emphasize her words. "I can't have you boring people about Puff. Lewis