In this winter of 1895-96, he suffered, feeling as he walked to the house and away from it that invisible eyes were looking at him from all the neighbours’ windows and that he was not holding up his head as he used to do. Only in the spacious tranquillity, the well-warmed atmosphere of egoism, the nicely arranged comfortable total indifference to all things except oneself, that permeates and makes up the charm of a really good London club--only there could he shake off his depression and feel sure that nobody was sympathising with him, pitying him, or blaming him; that if members laughed at the story of his fugitive child, they immediately forgot what had set them laughing; that if, going into the coffee-room, they connected the names of Anthony Dyke and Emmeline, they disconnected them again, and probably for ever, in the moment of asking for red currant jelly with the hot mutton or mixed pickles with the cold beef.
At Kensington these names had been fatally connected. Kensington knew that Dyke, the famous Anthony Dyke, was at the bottom of everything, at the side of it too, and all round it. The most faithful servants will chatter, even at the risk of losing the best of places. If people are quick at putting two and two together to make four, they are quicker still at putting one and one together to make two. Perhaps Miss Marchant, emissary to Mrs. Pryce-Jones, not really hoodwinked by Mrs. Verinder’s explanation, had continued to keep a watchful eye. Perhaps as well as Miss Marchant, the mournful angels on top of the Albert Memorial had seen the infatuated couple walking side by side, and had told the summer wind while begging it not to carry the news any further. Such things always leaked out somehow--more or less. Thus rumour, busy with both names, had enlivened drawing-rooms, by swift amplification; and in the protracted absence of Miss Verinder there had been reports that somebody or other had met her and Mr. Dyke at Monte Carlo, had lodged next door to them at Folkestone, had bumped into them at Tunbridge Wells.
During the church service she meditated, without emotion, upon her new social status. Glancing at one or two familiar faces she thought she could observe a rigidity of feature, a marble restraint of expression, that was something more than should be produced by absorbed interest in a religious exercise. They could not of course, at such a time and in such a place, even faintly nod or smile at an old friend; but their devotion was not surely quite so profound in past days; this statuesque aspect of the praying saint was surely new and significant. She felt a numb grief at having caused pain to her parents; but she cared nothing for the mental perturbation of these other people.