When the Cherbourg boat reached Guernsey, twenty-four hours behind her time, no Dinah, with radiant expectant face, waited on the quay to bid Gaston Arbuthnot good-morning.
It was the first occasion since their marriage that she had in like manner failed. After ever so short a separation it was Dinah’s habit to go bravely to the fore on harbour side or platform with a welcome for the husband she loved. No Dinah was to be seen this morning. And Gaston Arbuthnot’s spirit sat more lightly on its throne by reason of her absence.
He was honestly glad to return. A day and a night’s detention on a rock, with a thick sea-fog, and without one’s dressing-case, was a test, of sentiment and of friendship alike, which Gaston had felt to be beyond his strength. But it was a relief to him that poor Dinah, effusive, reproachful—Dinah, half sunshine, half tears—should not be on the pier to enact a little scene of domestic interest beneath the sharp, uncomprehending eyes of Linda Thorne.
‘Useless to ask you to breakfast with us,’ murmured that lady, from beneath her treble gauze mask, as she and Gaston were passing across the gangway. ‘Dear Mrs. Arbuthnot, I am sure, will be in a fever of anxiety about your return.’
‘Scarcely. Every one in Guernsey must have known that fog detained us. If you will be at home this afternoon,’ Gaston added, when their hands met at parting, ‘I will give you the latest bulletin as to Dinah’s condition.’
‘Oh, I make no promises,’ cried Linda, carelessly. ‘“He who will not when he may”—you know the rest of the proverb. Long before five o’clock to-day some tragic event may have changed us’—in after times this prophecy, made in jest, might possibly return to Linda Thorne’s memory—‘changed us for ever into enemies. Robbie, love, accept my arm. As you are quite determined that two shillings’ worth of cab would bring us to bankruptcy, we will return to our home and infant on foot.’
Doctor and Mrs. Thorne turned, on leaving the quay, into a narrow street leading towards the Old Town and The Bungalow. Gaston Arbuthnot, with the lightheartedness born of recovered freedom, ran quickly up the hundred-and-eighty steps that formed the shortest cut from the pier road to Miller’s Hotel. At the summit of these steps a new temptation assailed him in the person of old Colonel de Gourmet, the bachelor proprietor of the most luxurious little house, the best cellar, and the best cook in the Channel Archipelago.
‘Why, Arbuthnot! Some one told me you were at the bottom of the sea. You and Linda Thorne. Locksley Hall sort of thing! So goes the story of the moment. You are the very man I could have wished to meet, sir. Come back to breakfast with me. I have two of the finest mullet ever caught in this Channel, and Kutscheel, my black fellow, could dress a mullet with Brillat Savarin himself. Now, I’ll hear of no refusal.’
‘I have a wife, Colonel. The argument, naturally, does not carry weight with you. Still, it is an argument. I have a wife, and she expects me.’
‘Send up a line from my house telling Mrs. Arbuthnot where you are. I positively wouldn’t waste such fish on a man of less cultivated taste.’ In the Colonel’s lack-lustre eye there came a momentary glow of feeling. ‘In my time we used to look upon a palate—a palate, sir, as one of the essentials of a gentleman. The young men nowadays don’t know a mullet from a stickleback.’
Well, reader, a dual breakfast with old de Gourmet was a temptation, after its sort, that Gaston Arbuthnot ranked high. The Colonel’s admirably arranged house was screened by just sufficient leafy shadow from the eastern sun, refreshed by just sufficient air on the side where it opened to the sea. The Colonel’s black fellow was a finished artist; his cellar the long result of half a lifetime. To Gaston—true Parisian in all the more important business of existence—a noontide breakfast was the crowning meal of the day. Man dines, he would contend, as dogs or horses feed, because his body needs replenishment. Breakfast, with its delicate light dishes, fine wine, fruits and coffee,—breakfast succeeded by a prime cigar, morning sunshine, and morning talk—is, essentially, a refined, a human repast. The nine o’clock tea and toast, the marmalade, bloaters, or bacon, sacred to the British householder, were scarcely less horrible to him than the buckwheat cakes and maple syrup, the porridge, the pie, the ‘shad’ of American breakfast-tables.
‘If you can give me half an hour’s law, Colonel de Gourmet, time to have a bath, to get a change of apparel, and hear my wife’s version of the Locksley Hall episode, I will come to you. Otherwise, I know the nature of mullet, and——’
‘I appreciate your delicacy, my dear sir. But my black fellow and I thoroughly understand each other. Those mullet,’ said the Colonel, with a quiver of the lips, ‘are now reposing, each in its paper shroud, buttered, flavoured to a nicety. They will not approach the fire until Kutscheel sees me turn yonder corner beneath the Arsenal gates. I will wait for you here—putting the last finishing touch, alas! to a poorish appetite—as I limp up and down in the shade. But don’t exceed thirty-five minutes. We owe it to our cook, a human being with passions and weaknesses like unto our own, to have a conscience in these matters.’
A minute or two later, Gaston’s alert step had brought him to the outer gate of Miller’s Hotel. He loitered for a few seconds in the garden, enjoying its double sensation of warmth and flower scents. Then, with hesitation for which he would have found it hard to account, Gaston Arbuthnot entered the house. He traversed a passage, and opened the door of Dinah’s sitting-room.
It was empty. Her work-frame was shrouded in silver paper. A bouquet of hot-house flowers lay, with petals browned and faded, on the table, a card of Lord Rex Basire’s beside them. Gaston felt that the room had not been lived in since they left it last on Wednesday morning.
‘Madame had gone out,’ volunteered the black-eyed French waitress, peeping in at him through the half-open door—the black-eyed waitress building up dramatic likelihoods on the spot, possibly from the recollection of Madame’s tears of yesterday, possibly from Milor’s neglected bouquet on the table, possibly from a certain blank look on Arbuthnot’s face. ‘Madame had gone out—there was a good hour at least. Madame had left no message for Monsieur.’
For the first time since their marriage, thought Gaston Arbuthnot, not without a pang, as he walked off in silence to his dressing-room!
Well, there must be a first time, he supposed, in all one’s disillusionments. From to-day forth, he need never more expect a passionate greeting, perhaps never dread a passionate reproach from Dinah. And it was best so. Gaston had seen Clesinger’s rival statues of Rachel; one, the ‘Phèdre,’ the other, ‘Lesbia with her Sparrow.’ He infinitely preferred the Lesbia, sparrow, silliness, and all. Still, mused Mr. Arbuthnot, whose emotions had a trick of mounting quickly from the heart to the head, it might be a little stroke of wise and kindly diplomacy for him to exhibit discerning mortification, make Dinah feel that she had been forgetful of him. Forgetful! For the first time, surely, since that morning in the rustic Cambridgeshire church when she walked down the aisle, in her white straw bonnet, her simple cambric gown—his wife.
Accordingly, when he re-entered their sitting-room presently—Dinah absent still—Mr. Arbuthnot pencilled the following note, curtly amative, as was ever one of Captain Steele’s to his Prue!
‘MY DEAREST GIRL—My existence, I perceive, has slipped your memory. But I do exist. I am, at this moment, going out to breakfast—not in high spirits.
‘Your devoted
‘G. A.’
Gaston Arbuthnot pencilled this note. Then, with affections, it must be confessed, undividedly centred on red mullet, he started off, lightsome of mien, elastic of step, in the direction of Colonel de Gourmet’s house. At the first turning of the road a girl with golden hair, with a face fair, despite its pallor, as the summer morning, stood opposite to him—Dinah. A basket of strawberries hung on Mrs. Arbuthnot’s arm, a bunch of white moss-roses, her husband’s favourite flower, was between her hands.
‘Dinah, my love, this is fortunate. I have been hunting everywhere for you,’ said Gaston, hitting without effort upon one of those airy little nothings which float men of his weight, like corks, over half the whirlpools of life.
‘I am glad, in spite of all that has happened, to see you back.’
And Dinah, who had never uttered an airy nothing since she was born, looked hard at him. Traces, unmistakable, of tear-shedding gave an expression Gaston Arbuthnot liked not to her eyes.
‘Yet you did not show your gladness by meeting me on the pier—grim and dirty objects we must all have been after our twenty-four hours’ discomfort! Perhaps I deserved to be neglected,’ said Gaston, in a tone of resignation. ‘But remember, darling, I am not accustomed to miss your face when I have been away. The punishment, coming immediately after a course of Alderney and fog, struck me as rough.’
‘Don’t talk of punishment,’ Dinah answered, her voice betraying the strong effort by which she kept it controlled. ‘Your staying away has been hard to bear ... and now, now I wish to forget everything but that you are back safe.’
‘And what did you do with your time, yesterday? Of course you were not anxious. You knew that fog, and fog alone, was keeping me in Alderney.’
‘Yesterday was the blackest day I have ever lived through.’
And Dinah lifted her face, courting rather than turning from her husband’s scrutiny.
‘Blackest? Why, I thought you had had sunshine in Guernsey, that the fog concentrated itself with vile partiality upon our horrible rock yonder! And what did you do with your time, then,’ went on Gaston, with unabated cheerfulness. ‘Where was Geoffrey?’
‘I did not think of Geoffrey. I had heart for nothing but to stay in my own room.’
‘Substituting tea for dinner, close air for oxygen, as Woman loves to do when she is in trouble—or has manufactured trouble for herself. And had you no visitors at all to lighten your darkness?’
‘Lord Rex Basire seems to have called. His card was lying this morning on the parlour table.’
‘And you have no wider sympathies, Dinah, no desire to know how we, miserable deserters, got along in Alderney?’
‘I like, of course, to hear everything that concerns you.’
Dinah accentuated the pronoun stoutly.
‘Although you had not sufficient curiosity to meet me when I landed?’
As Gaston thus adroitly harked back upon his grievance his wife’s eyes sank. She turned from him with a movement of impatience.
‘The moment the steamer was signalled I got ready, Gaston. I went straight down to the pier road and watched her come into harbour. Oh, you never saw me,’ Dinah added quickly. ‘I was standing behind some piles of timber at the entrance to the pier, a hundred yards distant. And when I saw you and the Thornes land together, I felt certain you would walk with them to their house, and I lost courage and got away.’
‘To avoid the deadly risk of saying good-morning to Mrs. Thorne and the Doctor?’
‘I—I remembered there were no strawberries for breakfast,’ she stammered, determined upon not giving him fresh offence, ‘no roses to last us until to-morrow. Don’t you see,’ holding out her hands, which trembled a little, ‘I have been marketing?’
‘Alone? But I need hardly ask the question. You always do your marketing alone.’
His skilfully marshalled questions perplexed her vaguely. She felt the same aching doubt which overcame her, once, on board the Princess, a doubt as to Gaston’s belief in her perfect truthfulness.
‘Yes, and no,’ she answered, a piteous deprecation in her tone. ‘Lord Rex Basire was in the market-place. His company was so wearisome that I could scarcely answer a civil word. Yet he followed me from stall to stall. A lord, it seems, will not be affronted as a gentleman would. I never shook him off till I turned the corner beneath the Arsenal gates.’
‘From which point Lord Rex no doubt caught a glimpse of me,’ said Gaston with his unfathomable candour. ‘’Tis a good enough little creature in its way, although brainless! We must be tolerant of all men, Dinah. If one only frequented the society one loves best,’ he pursued, ‘I should certainly not be going out to breakfast at this moment.’
‘Going out!’
‘I saw de Gourmet at the bottom of the hill, and he invited me to eat red mullet with him thirty-five minutes later. You must admit, Dinah, that the temptation was strong?
To this she made no answer.
‘For when de Gourmet talks of red mullet he implies a menu. (Our food in Alderney was barbarous.) Rougets en papillottes, accompanied by fine old Graves. Tartines de caviar. Poulet sauté—with Château Margaux, of ’58. A soufflé aux fraises. A glass of wonderful Tokai after one’s morsel of Stilton! Still,’ added Gaston, ‘if you had met me on the pier I could never have said Yes—especially as I am obliged to dine at the Fort to-night.’
Again Dinah was mute. She rested her hand upon the garden railing beside which they stood. She kept the tears back, bravely, in their bed.
‘It is guest night at mess, and there will be a larger party than usual. My engagement dates, really, from a week ago. I made some idle promise, it seems, of giving the Maltshire youngsters a lesson in poker. By the bye,’ ran on Mr. Arbuthnot, with an air of spontaneous reminiscence, ‘I remember! Little Oscar Jones offered to put me up. Very lucky I thought of telling you.’
‘You intend to be away till to-morrow? Is that your meaning, Gaston?’
‘Till to-morrow, certainly. When can one get away from a mess-dinner before midnight! This time, however, you will not be disturbed, my love. Instead of being roused at an unearthly hour of the morning, you will have your rest unbroken. And you want it, Dinah. Do you know that you are losing your colour, that your eyes are beginning to look dark under the lower lid?’
‘And your evening dress? When you breakfast with Colonel de Gourmet, I generally see nothing of you for the remainder of the day.’
‘My dearest girl, you are all thoughtfulness. Just put together what I shall want in my Gladstone. Miller will see that it goes up to the Fort. And do not keep in your own room, Dinah, and do eat dinner, instead of drinking tea, for my sake.’
By this time Gaston Arbuthnot had progressed some paces along the descending path. Dinah had no choice but to return to the hotel, then settle down, after a scarcely tasted breakfast, to one of her accustomed days of loneliness and embroidery.
Alas! the mere mechanical business of cross-stitch irritated her cruelly. This conscientious sorting of coloured wools, this rigid counting of threads, this hour-long stabbing of a needle in and out of canvas—what good could be the outcome of it? She asked herself the question ere her needle had taken a dozen stitches. What ill has been lessened, thought Dinah, what pleasure added to mortal lot by all the collective pieces of wool-work which patient, dull-hearted women have executed since the world began?
A keen, eager soul like Marjorie Bartrand’s would have settled the question, unhelped, and finally, at about the age of eleven. Dinah’s nature was essentially averse to revolution. She was slow at imagining new futures, and an existence without cross-stitch would, to her, have been the newest of all possible existences. But pain was beginning to sting her, not only into rebellion, but into quickened intelligence. It was not merely the emptiness of wool-work as an occupation that overcame her. She felt humiliated by its want of art. She pictured the tasteless adornment of Aunt Susan’s humble parlour rendered a few shades more tasteless by the added pinks and greens and reds of her own laborious ottoman! She divined, as she had never done before, what her ‘pieces’ must seem like in the fastidious sight of Gaston and of his friends.
With a sensation of disgust poor Dinah pinned a screen of silver paper over her forget-me-nots and auriculas. Then she took Geoffrey’s volume of Browning from the table. Seating herself in a corner of the room farthest away from the fresh air, the enlivening summer odours and warmth which floated in from the garden, she began to read.
The book opened at ‘James Lee’s Wife.’
During the past twenty-fours hours she had pondered deeply over the wisdom to be gained at the hands of polite society. What was the Langrune expedition for her but an experiment, a lesson whereby she might acquire the manners, the temper, the ideas (if such existed) of her husband’s world! The experiment had taught her much. Yet, I think, ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ read and re-read, through tears, had taught her more. She had discovered no transcendental meaning, as a learned Browning Society might have done, in Browning’s words. But she was growing to look at life otherwise than by her own small rushlight of personal experience, to know that it was no new thing for a man’s fancy to die while his wife’s love burned at white heat, to realise that there was a wide world lying outside her own narrow embittered lot—a world to whose beauty and whose teachings the most self-engrossed soul must open itself or perish.
Dinah Arbuthnot did not want to perish. She could be content, she thought, although delight was gone out of her days, if use survived; ready to spin the wool and bake the bread; to return to the plain, sweet wholesomeness of workaday existence from which the hapless good fortune of marrying a gentleman had divorced her.
To part from Gaston, in short!
For an instant she had a physical longing to breathe the air of the Devonshire moorlands. A wild hope crossed her that she might go back to her father’s people, live their village lives, earn her own bread—be Dinah Thurston again. Then her heart smote her with violence. The volume fell to the floor. Could parting from Gaston be a beginning of better things, a turning towards the straight path of duty—that path along which so many a wife has to walk, uncomplaining, through the after years of a marriage to which happiness has not been granted? Her existence at his side was more, now, than a long, slow disappointment. It was a growing anguish, a combat in which ignorant, plain-speaking love on one side had no chance against a succession of sympathetic rivals all uttering perfect little flatteries, all giving perfect little dinners, on the other. And she, Dinah, was not two-and-twenty, and her young heart craved, insistently, for sunshine. And such a slender change, it seemed, in the eternal foreordering of events, a child at her knee, a husband loving the quiet of his own fireside, would have made up the sum of her prosaic ambition!
Yet she must go on enduring. She must not part from Gaston until the dark final curtain shut his face for ever from her sight. What taste could she have for the Devonshire moorlands, the country joys which contented her when she was a girl? No human soul can serve two masters. After knowing passionate love, passionate jealousy, how could she go back to a life of no emotion at all, how share the village interests of people like her father’s folk; simple souls with whom it was a vital point whether the next cake should be made with carraways or with raisins, who could speculate through half a winter as to who would be ‘asked,’ and who wear new bonnets on Easter Sunday, and in whose minds a visit to Exeter, or the yearly house-cleaning, ranked among the larger events of mortal destiny!
The poor girl was reluctantly coming to the conclusion—a hard one to realise at her age—that she would not be extraordinarily welcome anywhere, when Geff Arbuthnot, unannounced, as was his habit, entered the parlour.
He took in the position of affairs promptly. Dinah’s colourless face, her unoccupied hands, the book lying, as it had fallen, on the floor, told him, with gist passing that of words, that she was in some fresh misery of which Gaston was the cause.
Geoffrey’s own heart was sore, his spirit troubled, to-day. A thought distantly akin to that which had newly traversed Dinah’s mind for a moment overcame him. What a little change in the foreordering of things might have re-written the story of both lives! If Dinah Thurston had chanced to love him before his cousin Gaston crossed her path....
‘Alone—and indoors, Dinah?’ Her Christian name for once slipped from his lips. ‘It is a day,’ quoted Geff, ‘“when it were a sullenness against Nature not to go abroad and see her riches.” Has Gaston returned?’
‘Gaston and the Thornes have returned. The Cherbourg boat came in long ago. And I have been out—I went down to market before breakfast. I enjoyed the morning wonderfully.’
There was the kind of discrepancy between voice and statement that you might detect in the speech of a man who should declare he had ‘wonderfully enjoyed’ a funeral.
‘And what are you going to do with yourself this afternoon?’
‘I scarcely know—I am in an idle mood—write to one of the good old aunts in Devonshire, perhaps.’
‘And Gaston?’
‘Gaston will not be seen till to-morrow. He has, in the first place, gone out to breakfast. I was not on the pier when they landed, and Gaston ran quickly up here to dress. I only spoke to him for a few minutes outside the hotel. Colonel de Gourmet had waylaid him on the road, it seems, and invited him to breakfast—off red mullet! The temptation, Gaston said, was irresistible.’
A touch of sarcasm was in Mrs. Arbuthnot’s voice.
‘The Guernsey red mullet is not a bad fish,’ retorted Geff with appreciation.
‘Breakfasting, of course, means spending the day at Colonel de Gourmet’s house—until the hour comes round for afternoon teas! And to-night there is a dinner-party at the Fort. Gaston is forced to be there ... to give some of the Maltshire subalterns a lesson in poker. He will not be back till to-morrow, quite out of consideration for me! Gaston thought me looking pale. He did not wish me to have another broken night.’
The speech was delivered with a kind of staccato airiness. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s face became graver and graver while Dinah made it.
‘You are reading, I see, as usual. Why, you will be a confirmed bookworm before long.’
Coming closer, he picked up the volume from the floor. He examined the page at which it opened.
‘“James Lee’s Wife;” I should say you would soon know Mrs. Lee’s history by heart?’
‘I find something new in it, always. Don’t you think, Geff, so much writing must have gone far to ease her sorrow? Or would writing just come natural to an educated, born lady? In my class,’ said Dinah, ‘if trouble cut us very keen, we should not feel like taking a copy-book to write it down.’
The criticism, from Dinah’s point of view, was just. Geff sought not to controvert it.
‘The prettiest part of all is “Beside the drawing-board.” I was thinking, before you came in, I’d rather be the little girl with the poor coarse hand than write the best poetry ever printed.’
Geoffrey followed the drift of her remark.
‘And Gaston?’ he asked with point. ‘How about his opinion? We cannot look at a single small morsel of our lot, forgetting the rest. If there is one thing Gaston admires more than another in a woman, it is the whiteness and delicacy of her hand.’
‘All the same, Geff, I hate to live without work, common household work that makes the hands rough and red. Work is the same to me as your books are to you. And you know,’ added Dinah, ‘there must always be a world full of ladies, delicate, white-skinned, fond of idleness, whose finger-tips Gaston could admire.’
The observation gave Geff an inconveniently straight glimpse behind the domestic curtain of his friends’ lives. Moving to the table he became suddenly interested in Dinah’s marketing—the strawberries were in their wicker basket still; the roses hung their heads, as though conscious of neglect, over the rim of an ugly water-jug.
You may, generally, prognosticate safely as to the state of a woman’s heart when she treats her flowers lovelessly.
‘They were all for Gaston. You know how he likes to see fresh fruit and flowers on the breakfast-table.’
‘I know that the strawberries smell uncommonly good. They are to be kept, of course, for Gaston’s return?’
‘Oh, no.’ Dinah’s voice was blankly indifferent. ‘I don’t care now what becomes of them.’
‘You would do well to care!’ exclaimed Geoffrey, looking round on her, shortly. ‘There are a good many millions of people in the world, remember, besides Gaston Arbuthnot.’
‘Geoffrey!’
‘Yes, a good many millions, the majority of them poor, an enormous percentage—suffering. Gaston and you, and I, are surfeited with good things. We are certain every day we live that we shall dine—think of that, Mrs. Arbuthnot, dine, with the accompaniment of as many strawberries and roses as we choose to buy.’
The blood mantled hot over Dinah Arbuthnot’s weary face.
‘You mean to remind me that I am selfish?’ she said, very low. ‘I know it, Geoffrey. I know that I am sinking fast into everything that is bad.’
‘In the common meaning of the words, you are the least selfish woman living. But you are self-absorbed—no, even that is saying too much—you are Gaston-absorbed. If you could see how some half-starved people manage to get along—yes, and to be cheerful over their crust—you might think less of strawberries and roses for Gaston’s breakfast-table.’
The admonition looks rougher, set down in black and white, than it sounded. Dinah’s face grew animated.
‘I know that to be useful in any way would do me good. Long ago I should have liked district-visiting in England, only you see’—hesitating—‘we never stop long enough to explain ... I mean, for the clergyman of the place quite to know about one.’
Her tone was tentative. She had an uneasy dread that young women who marry men above them in rank are likely, if ‘unexplained,’ to be suspect in orthodox eyes. In their early married days she recollected a visit paid to them by a seaside curate with a subscription-list, recollected the seaside curate’s glance when Gaston introduced her, with her country speech and manners, as ‘my wife.’
And Dinah’s being the order of mind that generalises, for ever after, from one experience, that glance haunted her still, an uncomfortable reminder as to the likely sentiments of the clergy at large regarding herself.
‘Not long enough to explain! I don’t catch your meaning. What on earth has any clergyman in England to do with you, Dinah Arbuthnot? Could you not feel for miserable people, work for them, serve them heartily, although you travelled round the country, a heathen, in a caravan, although you had never spoken to a clergyman in your life!’
‘I want some one to show me the way,—that is another weakness of my character,—I want some one to show me the way in everything good, Geff.’
‘Let me show you the way, to-day. You remember the sailor lad who got his ankle hurt as we were coming back from France?’
That wretched passage in the fog? Yes, Dinah remembered every incident of it, too well.
‘There was worse mischief done than the surgeons feared, at first. Poor Jack is at present Number 28 in the accident ward of the hospital. He will have to remain there for a good many more weeks than he thinks. Well, one may safely assert, Mrs. Arbuthnot, that though you and I and Gaston have roses and strawberries to spare, Jack has none.’
‘Take them to him, of course,’ Dinah exclaimed. ‘Surely, Geff, you might have done that, without asking.’
‘And do you suppose Jack would not value such gifts more if they came from a woman’s hand, the delicate white hand whose uses you despise! To-day is Friday. On Friday afternoon the patients’ friends are admitted to see them. But Jack’s friends are far away in Devonshire. You will be his only visitor if you consent to come.’
Dinah rose, acquiescently, rather than with any initiative warmth. She had a moment’s hesitation. Gaston held such contradictory opinions, at times.... No knowing if Gaston would approve of her putting herself forward. There was the Archdeaconess ... there were the island clergy? Then, encountering a look that had a command in it from Geoffrey’s eyes, she moved lingeringly towards the adjoining room.
‘If I dressed to please myself, you need not wait two minutes, Geff. But the powers that be,’ the little malice flashed from her unawares, ‘are sensitive—as to millinery! I could not run the terrible risk of meeting Mrs. Thorne and Gaston in my morning gown.’