“That lady,” said Majendie, “as it happens, is my wife.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?  That’s what comes, you see, of not introducing people.  I’ll tell you one thing, Wallie.  She’s awfully handsome.  But you always had good taste.  Br-r-r, there’s a draught cutting my head off.  You might shut that window, there’s a dear.”

He shut it.

“And put my cup down.”

He put it down.

Anne saw him.  She had seen everything.

“And help me on with my cape.”

He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her gingerly.  A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was shaken from her as she turned her shoulder.  He hoped she was going.  But she was not going; not she.  Her body swayed towards him sinuously from hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable determination to sit on.

She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more atrociously luminous than the last.  “I must keep you up to the mark,” said she, as she turned with it.  “Your wife’s looking at you, and I feel responsible for your good behaviour.  Don’t keep her waiting.  Can’t you see she wants to go?”

“And I want to go, too,” said he savagely.  And he went.

And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie’s departure, Lady Cayley smiled softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.

She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her furious; she had made her go.

She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.

If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.

CHAPTER XIII

Anne and her husband walked home in silence across the Park, grateful for its darkness.  Majendie could well imagine that she would not want to talk.  He made allowance for her repulsion; he respected it and her silence as its sign.  She had every right to her resentment.  He had let her in for the Hannays, who had let her in for the inconceivable encounter.  On the day of her divorce Sarah Cayley had removed herself from Scale, and he had shrunk from providing for the supreme embarrassment of her return.  He had looked on her as definitely, consummately departed.  She had disappeared, down dingy vistas, into unimaginable obscurities.  He pictured her as sunk, in Continental abysses, beyond all possibility of resurgence.  And she had emerged (from abominations) smiling that indestructible smile.  The incident had been unpleasant, so unpleasant that he didn’t want to talk about it.  All the same, he would have done violence to his feelings and apologised for it then and there, but that he really judged it better to let well alone.  It was well, he thought, that Anne was so silent.  She might have had a great deal to say, and it was kind of her not to say it, to let him off so easily.