For Cally had carried her extraordinary point; now that Jack Dalhousie was henceforward indifferent to all these matters.
She had said, with the deadly flatness of the mood which her mother so dreaded, that she wanted to go home to-night, and there had been no reasoning with her. Go home for what? Mrs. Heth had asked it twenty times, battling desperately against the menacing madness, now with argument and threat, now with tears and wheedlings. And Cally, proceeding dry-eyed with her dressing and bag-packing, had proved unable to produce a single solid reason.
Still, it became clear that lock and key would not keep her. The options ensuing were whether her mother should go with her, or Hugo should go, or Cally be allowed to go alone. Small choice here, indeed.
Of that evening the events following the hurried departure from the Ambassadeurs were always blurred in Carlisle's memory. To Mrs. Heth each detail remained crystal-clear as long as she lived. Upon her shoulders, as usual, fell the burden of managing everything so that the least harm should befall. Defeated, and consequently hatted and cloaked, she emerged from the bedroom at quarter-past nine o'clock, commissioned by her daughter to tell Canning everything. But what was everything, and what the mere gibberish of nervous insanity, to pass forever from the horizon with a good night's sleep? Mrs. Heth, seated before her living Order of Merit in the sitting-room, interpreted her commission with a mother's wise discretion.
Canning, at this point, knew only that Carlisle was unnerved by news of the death of a friend. In the drive from the restaurant he had been cautioned to ask no questions, hysterics being intimated otherwise. Now Mrs. Heth gave him certain selected particulars: of a man who had been in love with Carlisle some years ago, though she had always discouraged him; of a misunderstanding that had arisen between them, which he, the man, had never got over; and now of his sudden decease, which came as a shock to the poor girl, awakening painful memories, and giving rise to a purely momentary sense of morbid responsibility.
"But why," said Canning, more and more mystified as he listened, "should she want to go back home?"