His face darkened as he read it.  He handed it back without a word.

The thing was not so incredible to the Vicar as it was to Mary.

He had always known that Robina could pull wires.  It was, in fact, through her ability to pull wires that Robina had so successfully held him up.  She had her hands on the connections of an entire social system.  Her superior ramifications were among those whom Mr. Cartaret habitually spoke and thought of as “the best people.”  And when it came to connections, Robina’s were of the very best.  Lady Frances was her second cousin.  In the days when he was trying to find excuses for marrying Robina, it was in considering her connections that he found his finest.  The Vicar had informed his conscience that he was marrying Robina because of what she could do for his three motherless daughters—­and himself.

Preferment even lay (through the Gilbeys) within Robina’s scope.

But to have planted Gwenda on Lady Frances Robina must have pulled all the wires she knew.  Lady Frances was a distinguished philanthropist and a rigid Evangelical, so rigid and so distinguished that, in the eyes of poor parsons waiting for preferment, she constituted a pillar of the Church.

To the Vicar, as he brooded over it, Robina’s act was more than mere protection of his daughter Gwenda.  Not only was it carrying the war into the enemy’s camp with a vengeance, it was an act of hostility subtler and more malignant than overt defiance.

Ever since she left him, Robina had been trying to get hold of the girls, regarding them as the finest instruments in her relentless game.  For it never occurred to Mr. Cartaret that his third wife’s movements could by any possibility refer to anybody but himself.  Robina, according to Mr. Cartaret, was perpetually thinking of him and of how she could annoy him.  She had shown a fiendish cleverness in placing Gwenda with Lady Frances.  She couldn’t have done anything that could have annoyed him more.  More than anything that Robina had yet done, it put him in the wrong.  It put him in the wrong not only with Lady Frances and the best people, but it put him in the wrong with Gwenda and kept him there.  Against Gwenda, with Lady Frances and a salary of a hundred a year at her back, he hadn’t the appearance of a leg to stand on.  The thing had the air of justifying Gwenda’s behavior by its consequences.

That was what Robina had been reckoning on.  For, if it had been Gwenda she had been thinking of, she would have kept her instead of handing her over to Lady Frances.  The companion secretaries of that distinguished philanthropist had no sinecure even at a hundred a year.

As for Gwenda’s accepting such a post, that proved nothing as against his view of her.  It only proved, what he had always known, that you could never tell what Gwenda would do next.

And because nothing could be said with any dignity, the Vicar had said nothing as he rose and went into his study.