Pamela took off her glasses and polished them.

“Rosalind would, of course.  What did you say?”

“I lost my temper.  I let out at her.  It’s not a thing I often do with Rosalind—­it doesn’t seem worth while.  But this time I saw red.  I told her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal.  I said, what if Nan and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm?  No use.  You can’t pin Rosalind down.  She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and said ’My dear, we all know our Nan.  We all know too that Stephen Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn’t live with his wife.  Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that they are seen everywhere together.  Why shut one’s eyes to obvious deductions?  You’re so like an ostrich, Neville.’  I said I’d rather be an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people’s concerns,—­and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker.”

“It’s no use tackling Rosalind,” Pamela agreed.  “She’ll never change her spots....  Do you suppose it’s true about Nan?”

“I daresay it is.  Yes, I’m afraid I do think it’s quite likely true....  Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda’s accident.  I was unhappy about her.  She was so hard, and so more than usually cynical and unget-at-able.  She told me it had been all her fault, leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to emulate and couldn’t.  I couldn’t read her, quite.  Her tone about Gerda had a queer edge to it.  And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought, so that she shouldn’t meet Barry.  Pamela, do you think she had finally and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with Gerda, or....”

Pamela said, “I know nothing.  She told me nothing.  But I rather thought, when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she had made up her mind to have him.  I may have been wrong.”

Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.

“Or you may have been right.  And if you were right, it’s the ghastliest tragedy—­for her....  Oh, I shouldn’t have let Gerda go and work with him; I should have known better....  Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers and with her funny little silent charm....  And if Nan was all the time waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her....  Poor darling Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn’t even want to marry....  If that’s the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley business.  Nan wouldn’t stay on in London, to see them together.  If Lumley caught her at that psychological moment, she’d very likely go off with him, out of mere desperation and bravado.  That would be so terribly like Nan....  What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is....  On the other hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his.  It’s her own affair whichever way it is; what we’ve got to do is to contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance.  Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts—­particularly Rosalind’s scandal.”