“Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?”

Farron raised his eyes and said: 

“Yes.”

“And what did she say?”

“What is there for me to say?” answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp voice that Mathilde hated.

There was a pause.  To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but, wishing to be patient, she explained: 

“Don’t you see it makes some difference in our situation?”

“The greatest, I should think,” said Adelaide, and just hinted that she might go back to her book at any instant.

“But don’t you think—­” Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her almost sharply.

“Mathilde,” he said, “there’s a well-known business axiom, not to try to get things on paper too early.”

She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an unusual strain is being put upon its faculties.  It seemed to her curious, but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject.  Suddenly Adelaide sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.

“I hope your headache will be better, Mama,” Mathilde hazarded; but Adelaide went without answering.  Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.

“You haven’t learned to wait,” he said.

“It’s so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!”

She was surprised that he smiled—­a smile that conveyed more pain than amusement.

“It is hard,” he said.

This closed the evening.  The next morning Vincent went down-town.  He went about half-past ten.  Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered for the first time that her husband had gone.  She was angry at Mathilde, who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was happening.

“You shouldn’t have let him go, Mathilde,” she said.  “You are old enough to have some judgment in such matters.  He is not strong enough.  He almost fainted yesterday.”

“But, Mama,” protested the girl, “I could not stop Mr. Farron.  I don’t think even you could have if he’d made up his mind.”

“Tell Pringle to order the motor at once,” was her mother’s answer.

Her distraction at her husband’s imprudence touched Mathilde so that she forgot everything else between them.

“O Mama,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re worried!  I’m sorry I’m one of your worries; but don’t you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?”

“God help you, then!” said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.

She drove to Vincent’s office.  It was not really care for his health that drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where she was more wretched away from him than with him.