Eleanor cannot speak, for Carol Quinton rises, and looks reproachfully into her eyes. She feels like a hunted stag, and yet she is glad--relieved.
"There! now you are in a hole," continues Giddy, laughing, "with no time to invent a plausible excuse. But come and sit down and ask forgiveness. I dare say Carol will get over it."
As yet Eleanor has not spoken. She walks like one in a trance to the quaint old chair Mrs. Mounteagle draws forward. She sits down mechanically and gazes at the colours in the carpet, just as she did once before at the Butterflies' Club.
"What a poor little world it is!" she thinks, "just like a muddy, narrow lane, through which its puppets drive or run, with the dirt thrown up in their faces at every turn."
"Come! do not look so glum over it," coos Giddy, removing Eleanor's cloak. "Carol knows as well as I do what a row you have been in, and how rusty Mr. Roche has turned. We are both most terribly sorry for you. I am sure I don't know how you stand him. It does so remind me of my late husband, from whom I was separated by mutual agreement two years before his death. Our quarrels began much in the same way. I preferred a will of my own, and meant to have it. He would have treated me like the chickens cooped up in the yard--a useful addition to his table, only their part was the most enviable. I should not have minded being cooked and roasted, for there my sorrows would have ceased."
"Death must be very pleasant," says Eleanor slowly, her head turning lightly to the alluring charms of suicide.
"No doubt, when you are old and ugly. But at present life is what you have got to consider, my dear."
"Life and buttered buns," replies Eleanor drily, as Mrs. Mounteagle hands the dish. "No, thank you, Giddy. I don't want any tea."
Her voice trembles with agitation, as Carol, who has never taken his eyes off her, draws a little nearer.
"If you won't eat anything, dear," murmurs Giddy, "at least you must drink something just to settle your nerves. Suction is so much more romantic than mastication."
"I am going to play peacemaker," declares Mrs. Mounteagle, "and leave you two to make it up. I have an important letter to write, which must catch the half-past five post. You owe Carol an apology, and that is always difficult in the presence of a third party."