began to laugh.
“No, it isn’t even respectable,” she cried. And her laughter was just in time. The door opened and Alec Osborn came in.
“What isn’t respectable?” he asked.
“Something I have been telling Emily,” she answered, laughing even a trifle wildly. “You are too young to hear such things. You must be kept respectable at any cost.”
He grinned, but faintly scowled at the same time.
“You’ve upset something,” he remarked, looking at the carpet.
“I have, indeed,” said Hester. “A cup of tea which was half milk. It will leave a grease spot on the carpet. That won’t be respectable.”
When she had tumbled about among native servants as a child, she had learned to lie quickly, and she was very ready of resource.
Chapter Nineteen
As she heard the brougham draw up in the wet street before the door, Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latchkey in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view.
Dr. Warren was of the mental build of the man whose life would be interesting and full of outlook if it were spent on a desert island or in the Bastille. He possessed the temperament which annexes incident and adventure, and the perceptiveness of imagination which turns a light upon the merest fragment of event. As a man whose days were filled with the work attendant upon the exercise of a profession from which can be withheld few secrets, and to which most mysteries explain themselves, his brain was the recording machine of impressions which might have stimulated to vividness of imagination a man duller than himself, and roused to feeling one of far less warm emotions.
He came into the room smiling. He was a man of fifty, of strong build, and masculine. He had good shoulders and good colour, and the eyes, nose, and chin of a man it would be a stupid thing to attempt to deal with in a blackguardly manner. He sat down in his chair by the fire and began to chat, as was his habit before he and his wife parted to dress for dinner. When he was out during the day he often looked forward to these chats, and made notes of things he would like to tell his Mary. During her day, which was given to feminine duties and pleasures, she frequently did the same thing. Between seven and eight in the evening they had delightful conversational opportunities. He picked up her book and glanced it over, he asked her a few questions and answered a few; but she saw it was with a somewhat preoccupied manner. She knew a certain remote look in his eye, and she waited to see him get up from his chair and begin to walk to and fro, with his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back. When, after having done this, he began in addition to whistle softly and draw his eyebrows together, she broke in upon him in the manner of merely following an established custom.
“I am perfectly sure,” was her remark, “that you have come upon one of the Extraordinary Cases.”
The last two words were spoken as with inverted commas. Of many deep interests he added to her existence, the Extraordinary Cases were among the most absorbing. He had begun to discuss them with her during the first year of their married life. Accident had thrown one of them into her immediate personal experience, and her clear-headed comprehension and sympathy in summing up singular evidence had been of such value to him that he had turned to her in the occurrence of others for the aid straightforward, mutual logic could give. She had learned to await the Extraordinary Case with something like eagerness. Sometimes, it was true, its incidents were painful; but invariably they were absorbing in their interest, and occasionally illuminating beyond description. Of names and persons it was not necessary she should hear anything—the drama, the ethics, were enough. With an absolute respect for his professional reserves, she asked no questions he could not reply to freely, and avoided even the innocent following of clues. The Extraordinary Case was always quite enough as it stood. When she saw the remotely speculative look in his eye, she suspected one, when he left his chair and paced the floor with that little air of restlessness, and ended with unconscious whistling which was scarcely louder than a breath, she felt that evidence enough had accumulated for her.
He stopped and turned round.
“My good Mary,” he owned at once, “its extraordinariness consists in its baffling me by being so perfectly ordinary.”
“Well, at least that is not frequent. What is its nature? Is it awful? Is it sad? Is it eccentric? Is it mad or sane, criminal or domestic?”
“It is nothing but suggestive, and that it suggests mystery to me makes me feel as if I myself, instead of a serious practitioner, am a professional detective.”
“Is it a case in which you might need help?”
“It is a case in which I am impelled to give help, if it proves that it is necessary. She is such an exceedingly nice woman.”
“Good, bad, or indifferent?”
“Of a goodness, I should say—of a goodness which might prevent the brain acting in the manner in which a brutal world requires at present that the human brain should act in self-defence. Of a goodness which may possibly have betrayed her into the most pathetic trouble.”
“Of the kind—?” was Mrs. Warren’s suggestion.
“Of that kind,” with a troubled look; “but she is a married woman.”
“She says she is a married woman.”
“No. She does not say so, but she looks it. That’s the chief feature of the case. Any woman bearing more obviously the stamp of respectable British matrimony than this one does, it has not fallen to me to look upon.”
Mrs. Warren’s expression was _intriguée_ in the extreme. There was a freshness in this, at least.
“But if she bears the stamp as well as the name—! Do tell me all it is possible to tell. Come and sit down, Harold.”
He sat down and entered into details.
“I was called to a lady who, though not ill, seemed fatigued from a hurried journey and, as it seemed to me, the effects of anxiety and repressed excitement. I found her in a third-class lodging-house in a third-class street. It was a house which had the air of a place hastily made inhabitable for some special reason. There were evidences that money had been spent, but that there had been no time to arrange things. I have seen something of the kind before, and when I was handed into my patient’s sitting-room, thought I knew the type I should find. It is always more or less the same,—a girl or a very young woman, pretty and refined and frightened, or pretty and vulgar and ‘carrying it off’ with transparent pretences and airs and graces. Anything more remote from what I expected you absolutely cannot conceive.”
“Not young and pretty?”
“About thirty-five or six. A fresh, finely built woman
