When occasion demanded Mr. Glynde could wield a very strong silence--stronger than he thought. He wielded it now, and Mrs. Agar shuffled before it, her eyes glittering with suppressed communicativeness. She was obviously bubbling over with talk relevant and irrelevant, but the Rector had the chivalry to check it by his cold silence.
After a pause it was he who spoke, in a quiet, unemotional voice which aggravated while it cowed her.
"Oh, last night. It was so late that I did not send down. I--it was so sudden. I was terribly upset."
"I telegraphed to Arthur first thing this morning," the mistress of Stagholme went on eagerly, "and I was just going to write to you when you came in."
With that nervous desire for corroborative evidence which arouses the suspicion of the observant whenever it appears, Mrs. Agar indicated the writing-table with open blotter and inkstand. Instantly, but too late, she regretted having done so, for a volume playfully called "Every Man his own Lawyer" lay confessed beside the writing-case, and its home on the bookshelf stared vacantly at them.
"And from whom did you hear it?" pursued the Rector, heartlessly looking at the book with an air of recognition.
"Oh, from a Mr. Johnson--at the War Office, or the India Office, or somewhere. I suppose I ought to write and thank him. Let me see--where is the telegram?"
She shuffled among the papers on the writing-table, and made the hideous mistake of pushing "Every Man his own Lawyer" behind the stationery case.
It was a long document. Mr. Johnson, not having to pay for telegraphic expenses out of his own pocket, had done his task thoroughly. He stated clearly that the advance column under Colonel Stevenor, Major Agar, and another British officer had been surprised and annihilated. There were no particulars yet, nor could reliable details be expected, as it was quite certain that not one man of the ill-fated corps had survived. General Seymour, added the official, missing out in his haste the commanding officer's surname, had promptly repaired to the scene of the disaster, to punish the victors, and, if possible, recover the effects of the slain.
Mrs. Agar was one of those persons who are incapable of reading a letter or a telegram thoroughly. She was one of those for whose comprehension the wrong end of the story must have been specially created. Had the official put Seymour Michael's name in full, it is probable that in her infantile excitement she would have failed to take it in or to connect it with the man who had wronged her twenty years before.