This was reserved for another hand.

It was impossible for Mrs. Wilcox to live, even obscurely, in Drayton Parva without hearing some garbled version of the current rumor.  At first she was a little shocked at finding her son-in-law under a cloud.  But if there is one truth more indisputable than another, it is that every cloud has a handsome silver lining to it. (Though, indeed, from Mrs. Wilcox’s account of the matter, it was impossible to tell which was the lining and which was the cloud.) The more she thought of it the more she felt that there was nothing in it.  There must be some misunderstanding somewhere.  Her optimism, rooted in ignorance, and watered with vanity, had become a sort of hardy perennial.

Then it came to Mrs. Wilcox’s knowledge that certain reflections had been made on her daughter’s conduct.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson was said to be making good use of her liberty.  No names had been mentioned in Mrs. Wilcox’s hearing, but she knew perfectly well what had given rise to these ridiculous reports.  It was the conspicuous attention which Sir Peter had insisted on paying Mrs. Nevill Tyson.  Not that there was anything to be objected to in an old gentleman’s frank admiration for a young (and remarkably pretty) married woman.  No doubt Sir Peter had been very indiscreet in his expression of it.  What with calling on her in private and paying her the most barefaced compliments in public, he had made her the talk of the county.  Mrs. Wilcox went further:  she was firmly convinced that Sir Peter had fallen a hopeless victim to her daughter’s attractions, and she had derived a great deal of gratification from the flattering thought.  But now that Molly was being compromised by the old fellow’s attentions, it was another matter.

That anybody else could have compromised her by his attentions did not once occur to Mrs. Wilcox.  By its magnificent unlikelihood, the idea that Sir Peter Morley, M.P., was fascinated by her daughter extinguished every other.  So possessed was Mrs. Wilcox by the idea of Sir Peter that she had never thought of Stanistreet.  In any case Stanistreet was the last person she would have thought of.  He came and went without her notice, a familiar, and therefore insignificant, fact of her daily life.

Of course Molly was a desperate little flirt; but it was absurd that her flirtations should be made responsible for “this temporary separation.”  (That was the mild phrase by which Mrs. Wilcox described Tyson’s desertion of his wife.) As for her encouraging Sir Peter in her husband’s absence, that was all nonsense.  Mrs. Wilcox was a woman of the world, and she would have passed the whole thing off with a laugh, but that, really, the reports were so scandalous.  They actually declared that her daughter had been seen going about with Sir Peter in the most open and shameless manner, ever since she had been left to her own devices.

Well, Mrs. Wilcox could disprove that by the irrefragable logic of facts.