Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/197

Rh V

' has come in?'

'No, miss; but Mrs. Despard is here. She said she'd wait for you.'

'Then I'm not at home to any one.' Margaret Hamer went straight upstairs and found her visitor in the smaller drawing-room, not seated, erect before the fireplace and with the air of having for some time restlessly paced and turned. Mrs. Despard hailed her with an instant cry.

'It has come at last!'

'Do you mean you've seen your husband?'

'He dropped on me to-day—out of the blue. He came in just before luncheon. If the house is his own!' And Mrs. Despard, who, as with the first relief to her impatience, had flung herself, to emphasise her announcement on the sofa, gave a long, sombre sigh.

'If the house is his own he can come when he likes?' Standing before her and looking grave and tired, Margaret Hamer showed interest, but kept expression down. 'And yet you were so splendidly sure,' she continued, 'that he wouldn't come!'

'I wasn't sure—I see now I wasn't; I only tried to convince myself. I knew—at the back of my head—that he probably was in England; I felt in all my bones—six weeks ago, you know—that he would really have returned and, in his own infamous, underhand way, would be somewhere looking out. He told me to-day about ninety distinct lies. I don't know how he has kept so dark, but he has been at one of the kind of places he likes—some fourth-rate watering-place.'

Margaret waited a moment. 'With any one?'

'I don't know. I don't care.' This time, for emphasis, Mrs. Despard jumped up and, wandering, like a caged creature, to a distance, stopped before a glass and gave a touch or two