“Go away,” she answered.  “It is all like a thing in a play, but I know what I am talking about.  Say you are ordered abroad.  Be cool and matter-of-fact.  Simply go and hide yourself somewhere, and call your husband home as soon as he can travel.”

Emily Walderhurst passed her hand over her forehead.

“It is like something in a play,” she said, with a baffled, wondering face.  “It isn’t even respectable.”

Hester began to laugh.

“No, it isn’t even respectable,” she cried.  And her laughter was just in time.  The door opened and Alec Osborn came in.

“What isn’t respectable?” he asked.

“Something I have been telling Emily,” she answered, laughing even a trifle wildly.  “You are too young to hear such things.  You must be kept respectable at any cost.”

He grinned, but faintly scowled at the same time.

“You’ve upset something,” he remarked, looking at the carpet.

“I have, indeed,” said Hester.  “A cup of tea which was half milk.  It will leave a grease spot on the carpet.  That won’t be respectable.”

When she had tumbled about among native servants as a child, she had learned to lie quickly, and she was very ready of resource.

Chapter Nineteen

As she heard the brougham draw up in the wet street before the door, Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latch-key in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her.  The man who, after twenty-five years of marriage, can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view.

Dr. Warren was of the mental build of the man whose life would be interesting and full of outlook if it were spent on a desert island or in the Bastille.  He possessed the temperament which annexes incident and adventure, and the perceptiveness of imagination which turns a light upon the merest fragment of event.  As a man whose days were filled with the work attendant upon the exercise of a profession from which can be withheld few secrets, and to which most mysteries explain themselves, his brain was the recording machine of impressions which might have stimulated to vividness of imagination a man duller than himself, and roused to feeling one of far less warm emotions.