I thought of Mr. Pyne, wondering if, before his trip to Atlantic City with Mrs. Grimshaw, he, too, had wandered about his house, appraising its possibilities from the point of view of a new mistress.
On the Friday when Mrs. Brokenshire came and Mr. Grainger did not she made no comment on his non-appearance. She even sustained with some success the fiction that her visit was on my account. Only her soft eyes turned with a quick light toward the door leading to the house at every sound that might have been a footstep.
When she talked it was chiefly about Mr. Brokenshire.
"It's telling on him--all this trouble about Hugh."
"It's made him older--and grayer--and the trouble with his eye comes oftener."
It seemed to me that I saw an opportunity.
"Give in? Mr. Brokenshire? Why, he never gave in in his life."
"He'd rather suffer than give in. He's not an unkind man, not really, so long as he has his own way; but once he's thwarted--"
"Every one has to be thwarted some time."
"He'd agree to that; but he'd say every one but him. That's why, when he first met--met me--and my mother at that time meant to have me--to have me marry some one else-- You knew that, didn't you?"
I reminded her that she had told me so among the rocks at Newport.
"Did I? Perhaps I did. It's--it's rather on my mind. I had to change so--so suddenly. But what I was going to say was that when Mr. Brokenshire saw that mamma meant me to marry some one else, and that I--that I wanted to, there was nothing he didn't do. It was in the papers--and everything. But nothing would stop him till he'd got what he wanted."
"Mamma gave it to him. I had to do as I was told. You'd say, I suppose, that I needn't have done it, but you don't know." She hesitated before going on. "It--it was money. We--we had to have it. Mamma thought that Mr.--the man I was to have married first--would never have any more. It was all sorts of things on the Stock Exchange--and bulls and bears and things like that. There was a whole week of it--and every one knew it was about me. I nearly died; but mamma didn't mind. She enjoyed it. It's the sort of thing she would enjoy. She made me go with her to the opera every night. Some one always asked us to sit in their box. She put me in the front where the audience watched me through their opera-glasses more than they did the stage--and I was a kind of spectacle. There was one night--they were singing the 'Meistersinger'--when I felt just like Eva, put up as a prize for whoever could win me. But I was talking of Mr. Brokenshire, wasn't I? Do you think his eye will ever be any better?"