“My hat!  What an evening!  I shall have a ripping ride down.  Don’t say there’s no room on the top.  Cheer up, Dorothy!”

Which showed that Rosalind Jervis was a free woman, suggested that life had richer thrills than marrying Dorothy’s brother Michael, and fixed the detested imputation securely on her friend.

Dorothy watched her as she swung herself on to the footboard and up the stair of the motor bus.  There was room on the top.  Rosalind, in fact, had the top all to herself.

* * * * *

As Dorothy crossed the Heath again in the twilight she saw something white on the terrace of her father’s house.  Her mother was waiting for her.

She thought at first that Aunt Emmeline had gone off her head and that she had been sent for to keep her quiet.  She gloried in their dependence on her.  But no, that wasn’t likely.  Her mother was just watching for her as she used to watch for her and the boys when they were little and had been sent across the Heath to Grannie’s house with a message.

And at the sight and memory of her mother Dorothy felt a childish, sick dissatisfaction with herself and with her day, and an absurd longing for the tranquillity and safety of the home whose chief drawback lately had been that it was too tranquil and too safe.  She could almost have told her mother how they had all gone for her, and how Rosalind had turned out rotten, and how beastly it had all been.  Almost, but not quite.  Dorothy had grown up, and she was there to protect and not to be protected.  However agreeable it might have been to confide in her mother, it wouldn’t have done.

Frances met her at the garden door.  She had been crying.

“Nicky’s come home,” she said.

“Nicky?”

“He’s been sent down.”

“Whatever for?”

“Darling, I can’t possibly tell you.”

But in the end she did.

XII

Up till now Frances had taken a quiet interest in Women’s Suffrage.  It had got itself into the papers and thus become part of the affairs of the nation.  The names of Mrs. Palmerston-Swete and Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite had got into the papers, where Frances hoped and prayed that the name of Dorothea Harrison might not follow them.  The spectacle of a frantic Government at grips with the Women’s Franchise Union had not yet received the head-lines accorded to the reports of divorce and breach of promise cases and fires in paraffin shops; still, it was beginning to figure, and if Frances’s Times ignored it, there were other papers that Dorothy brought home.

But for Frances the affairs of the nation sank into insignificance beside Nicky’s Cambridge affair.

There could be no doubt that Nicky’s affair was serious.  You could not, Anthony said, get over the letters, the Master’s letter and the Professor’s letter and Michael’s.  They had arrived one hour after Nicky, Nicky so changed from his former candour that he refused to give any account of himself beyond the simple statement that he had been sent down.  They’d know, he had said, soon enough why.