Sister Teresa | Page 5

own circle of friends; and all the while Evelyn's face smiled, her eyes and her lips and her thoughts were atingle. Nonsense! Yes, it was nonsense! But what delicious nonsense! and she waited for somebody to speak of Canary--the "love machine," as he was called. No sooner had the thought come into her mind than somebody mentioned his name, telling how Beatrice, after sending him away in the luggage-cart, had yielded and taken him back again. "He is her interest," Evelyn said to herself, and she heard that Canary still continued to cause Beatrice great unhappiness; and some interesting stories were told of her quarrels--all her quarrels were connected with Canary. One of the most serious was with Miss ----, who had gone for a walk with him in the morning; and the guests at Thornton Grange were divided regarding Miss ----'s right to ask Canary to go for a walk with her, for, of course, she had come down early for the purpose, knowing well that Beatrice never came downstairs before lunch.
"Quite so." The young man was listened to, and he continued to argue for a long while that it was not reasonable for a woman to expect a man to spend the whole morning reading the _Times_, and that apparently was what Beatrice wished poor Canary to do until she chose to come down. Nevertheless, the general opinion was in favour of Beatrice and against the girl.
"Beatrice has been so kind to her," and everybody had something to say on this point.
"But what happened?" Evelyn asked, and the leader of this conversation, a merry little face with eyes like wild flowers and a great deal of shining hair, told of Beatrice's desperate condition when the news of Miss ----'s betrayal reached her.
"I went up and found her in tears, her hair hanging down her back, saying that nobody cared for her. Although she spends three thousand a year on clothes, she sits up in that bedroom in a dressing-gown that we have known for the last five years. "Well, Beatrice," I said, "if you'll only put on a pair of stays and dress yourself and come downstairs, perhaps somebody will care for you."
A writer upon economic subjects who trailed a black lock of hair over a bald skull declared he could see the scene in Beatrice's bedroom quite clearly, and he spoke of her woolly poodle looking on, trying to understand what it was all about, and his allusion to the poodle made everybody laugh, for some reason not very apparent, and Evelyn wondered at the difference between the people she was now among and those she had left--the nuns in their convent at the edge of Wimbledon Common, and her thoughts passing back, she remembered the afternoon in the Savoy Hotel spent among her fellow-artists.
Her reverie endured, she did not know how long; only that she was awakened from it by Lady Ascott, come to tell her it was time to go upstairs to dress for dinner. Now with whom would she go down? With Owen, of course, such was the etiquette in houses like Thornton Grange. It was possible Lady Ascott might look upon them as married people and send her down with somebody else--one of those young men! No! The young men would be reserved for the girls. As she suspected, she went down with Owen. He did not tell her where he had been since she last saw him; intimate conversation was impossible amid a glitter of silver dishes and anecdotes of people they knew; but after dinner in a quiet corner she would hear his story. And as soon as the men came up from the dining-room Owen went straight towards her, and she followed him out of hearing of the card-players.
"At last we are alone. My gracious! how I've looked forward to this little talk with you, all through that long dinner, and the formal talk with the men afterwards, listening to infernal politics and still more infernal hunting. You didn't expect to meet me, did you?"
"No; Lady Ascott said nothing about your being here when she came to the concert."
"And perhaps you wouldn't have come if you had known I was here?"
"Is that why you didn't come to the concert?"
"Well, Evelyn, I suppose it was. You'll forgive me the trickery, won't you?" She took his hand and held it for a moment. "That touch of your hand means more to me than anything in the world." A cloud came into her face which he saw and it pained him to see it. "Lady Ascott wrote saying she intended to ask you to Thornton Grange, so I wrote at once asking her if she could put me up; she guessed an estrangement, and being a kind woman, was anxious to put it