To-day he found her in a state of agitated perplexity.  She put a letter into his hands.  He was to read it; he might skip the first page, it was all about calico.  There—­that was what she meant.

The letter was from Mrs. Wilcox imploring her to go back to Drayton “till this little cloud blows over.”

“I don’t want to go to Drayton, to those people.  They talk.  I know they talk, and I don’t like them.  Besides, I want to stay in London.  Nobody knows me here except you.”

“Do I know you?”

“Well, if you don’t, you ought to—­by now.  I wonder if mother wants me.  She might come here, though I’d rather she didn’t.  She talks too, you know; she doesn’t mean to, but she can’t help it.  What I like about you is—­you never talk.”

“You won’t let me.”

“What ought I to do?” she asked helplessly.  “Must I go?”

“No,” said Louis emphatically.  “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

He tossed the letter aside, and their eyes met.

“It would look like defeat.”

CHAPTER XIII

MRS. WILCOX TO THE RESCUE

So Nevill Tyson had left his wife.  This was the most exciting act in the drama that had entertained Drayton Parva for two years.  He had brought down the house.  Presently it seemed that Drayton Parva was not unprepared for the catastrophe.  Miss Batchelor was sadly afraid that something of this sort had been going on for long enough.  But she had not condemned Nevill Tyson wholesale and without a hearing; in these cases there are always faults on both sides.  A man as much in love with his wife as he was would never have left her without some grounds. (I cannot think why Miss Batchelor, being so clever, didn’t see through Tyson; but there is a point at which the cleverness of the cleverest woman ceases.) Anyhow, if Mrs. Nevill Tyson was as innocent as one was bound to suppose, why did she not come back to Drayton, to her mother?  That was the proper thing for her to do under the circumstances.

Have you ever sat by the seashore playing with pebbles in an idle mood?  You are not aiming at anything, you are much too lazy to aim; but some god directs your arm, and, without thinking, you hit something that, ten to one, you never would have hit if you had thought about it.  After that your peace is gone; you feel that you can never leave the spot till you have hit that particular object again, with deliberate intent.  So Miss Batchelor, sitting by the shore of the great ocean of Truth, began by throwing stones aimlessly about; and other people (being without sin) picked them up and aimed them at Mrs. Nevill Tyson.  Sometimes they hit her, but more often they missed.  They were clumsy.  Then Miss Batchelor joined in; and, because she found that she was more skillful than the rest, she began, first to take a languid interest in the game, then to play as if her life depended on it.  She aimed with mathematical precision, picking out all the tiny difficult places that other people missed or grazed.  Amongst them they had ended by burying Mrs. Nevill Tyson up to her neck in a fairly substantial pile of pebbles.  It only needed one more stone to complete the work.  Still, as I said before, Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s enemies were not particularly anxious to throw it.