Helen leaned across the table and laid her hand upon her friend's.
“Dear,” she sighed, “it worries me so to hear you talk like that.”
“Because you know perfectly well, although you profess to ignore it, that at the bottom of your heart there is no one else but Henry. It isn't fair, you know.”
“To whom isn't it fair?” Philippa demanded.
Philippa was thoughtful for a few moments.
“Perhaps,” she admitted, “that is a point of view which I have not sufficiently considered.”
“I don't think you realise, Philippa,” she said, “how madly in love with you the man is. In a perfectly ingenuous way, too. No one could help seeing it.”
“Then where does the unfairness come in?” Philippa asked. “It is within my power to give him all that he wants.”
“But you wouldn't do it, Philippa. You know that you wouldn't!” Helen objected. “You may play with the idea in your mind, but that's just as far as you'd ever get.”
Philippa looked her friend steadily in the face. “I disagree with you, Helen,” she said. Helen set down the glass which she had been in the act of raising to her lips. It was her first really serious intimation of the tragedy which hovered over her future sister-in-law's life. Somehow or other, Philippa had seemed, even to her, so far removed from that strenuous world of over-drugged, over-excited feminine decadence, to whom the changing of a husband or a lover is merely an incident in the day's excitements. Philippa, with her frail and almost flowerlike beauty, her love of the wholesome ways of life, and her strong affections, represented other things. Now, for the first time, Helen was really afraid, afraid for her friend.
“But you couldn't ever--you wouldn't leave Henry!”
Philippa seemed to find nothing monstrous in the idea.
“That is just what I am seriously thinking of doing,” she confided.
Helen affected to laugh, but her mirth was obviously forced. Their conversation ceased perforce with the return of Mills into the room.
Then the wonderful thing happened. The windows of the dining room faced the drive to the house and both women could clearly see a motor car turn in at the gate and stop at the front door. It was obviously a hired car, as the driver was not in livery, but the tall, mulled-up figure in unfamiliar clothes who occupied the front seat was for the moment a mystery to them. Only Helen seemed to have some wonderful premonition of the truth, a premonition which she was afraid to admit even to herself. Her hand began to shake. Philippa looked at her in amazement.