CHAPTER XIII

There is nothing like a meal, especially a good meal, for inducing between two people an agreeable sense of intimacy.  When Enid Crofton and her elderly sister-in-law passed from the dining-room of The Trellis House into the gay-looking little sitting-room, with its old-fashioned, brightly coloured chintz furnishings, and quaint reproductions of eighteenth-century prints, the two ladies were far more at ease the one with the other than before luncheon.

Enid, in the plain black woollen gown, with its white linen collar and cuffs, which she had discarded almost at once after her husband’s funeral, felt that she was producing a pleasant impression.  As they sat down, one on each side of the cheerful little wood fire, and began sipping the excellent coffee which the mistress of the house had already taught her very plain cook to make as it should be made, she suddenly exclaimed:—­

“I do want to thank you again for the money you sent me when poor Cecil died!  It was most awfully good of you, and very useful, too, for the insurance people did not pay me for nearly a month.”

These words gave her visitor an opening for which she had waited during the last hour:  “I’m glad my present was so opportune,” said Miss Crofton in her precise, old-fashioned way.  “As we have mentioned money, I should like to know, my dear, how you are situated?  I was afraid from something Cecil told me last time he and I met that you would be very poorly left.”

She stopped speaking, and there followed a long pause.  Enid Crofton was instinctively glad that she was seated with her back to the window.  She was afraid lest her face should betray her surprise and discomfiture at the question.  And yet, what more natural than that her well-to-do, kind-hearted sister-in-law should wish to know how she, Enid, was now situated?

Cecil Crofton’s widow was not what ordinary people would have called a clever woman, but during the whole of her short life she had studied how to please, cajole, and yes—­deceive, the men and women about her.  Unfortunately for her, Alice Crofton was a type of woman with whom she had never before been brought in contact; and something deep within her told her that she had better stick as close to the truth as was reasonably possible with this shrewd spinster who was, in some ways, so disconcertingly like what Enid Crofton’s late husband had been, in the days when he had been a forlorn girl-widow’s protecting friend and ardent admirer.

Yet, even so, she began with a lie:  “When my mother died last year she left me a little money.  I thought it wise to spend it in getting this house, and in settling down here.”  She said the words in a very low voice, and as Miss Crofton said nothing for a moment, she added timidly:—­“I do hope that you think I did right?  I know people think it wrong to use capital, but the War has changed everything, including money, and one simply can’t get along at all without paying out sums which before the War would have seemed dreadful.”