Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/358

Rh The butler meditated. “Sharp at four, sir. The maid took the three-forty with the luggage.”

With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose slowly to Amherst’s face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out, carrying an elaborately—appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.… The butler looked at Amherst with respectful—too respectful—interrogation, and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips.

Well—it had to be spoken! “Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone message?”

“Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself.”

It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man—as Lynbrook understood the phrase—would, at this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his wife’s confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents—he could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of the situation—but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the smoking-room. [ 342 ]