She spoke sternly—­as she might have spoken to herself in a moment of dear, but dismal failure.

“Hush,” she commanded.  “You are one of us, and you have no right to desert us.  It is because you are his wife that my home is yours and your children’s.  I am only his sister, and I have stood by him through it all.  Do you think, if his sins were twenty times as great, that I should fall away from him now?”

Lottie looked at her and laughed—­a little heartless laugh.

“Oh, but I am not a Battle,” she replied bitterly.  “Battle sins are just like other people’s sins to me.”

Then she raised her pretty, nerveless hands to her throat.

“I have wanted to be free all these years,” she said.  “All these years when you would not let me forget Bernard Battle—­when you shut me up and hid me away, and made me old when I was young.  And now—­just as I am beginning to be happy with my children—­you tell me that I must go back to him and start afresh.”

Her voice grated upon Eugenia’s ears, and she realised more acutely than her pity the fact that Lottie was common—­hopelessly common.  For an instant she forgot Bernard’s greater transgressions in the wonder that a Battle should have married a woman who did not know how to behave in a crisis—­who could even chant her wrongs from the housetop.  At the moment this seemed to her the weightier share of the family remissness.  The loyalty of the Battle wives had been as a lasting memorial to the Battle breeding—­which, after all, was more invincible than the Battle virtue.

She crossed to the window and stood looking out upon the winter sunshine falling on the gray church across the way.  On the stone steps a negro nurse was sitting, drowsily trundling back and forth before her a beruffled baby carriage.  Nearer at hand, in the yard on the left of the tesselated entrance below, a pointed magnolia tree shone evergreen beside the naked poplars, and a bevy of sparrows fluttered in and out amid the sheltering leaves.

“Oh, you will never understand,” wailed Lottie.  She had flung herself upon the couch and was sobbing weakly.  “It is so different with you and Dudley.”

Eugenia turned and came back.  “I do understand,” she returned gently, and before Lottie could raise her lowered head she left the room.

She had promised Dudley that the calls should be made, and she put on her visiting gown without a thought of shirking the fulfilment of her pledge.  From the day of her marriage she had zealously accepted the obligations forced upon her by Dudley’s political aspirations, and Mrs. Rann became to-day simply a heavier responsibility than usual.  Her world was full of Mrs. Ranns, and she braved them with dauntless spirits and triumphant humour.  As she buttoned her gloves on the way downstairs she was conscious of a singularly mild recognition of the fact that the world might have been the gainer had Mrs. Rann abided unborn.