“My wife has got a headache,” he said.  “She wanted to come over with me, but I made her lie down.  Nothing like lying down for a headache.  We expect it in June, you know.  Let me get you your tea.”

Mrs. Pendyce, already aware even to the day of what he expected in June, sat down, and looked at Mr. Barter with a slight feeling of surprise.  He was really a very good fellow; it was nice of him to make his wife lie down!  She thought his broad, red-brown face, with its protecting, not unhumorous, lower lip, looked very friendly.  Roy, the Skye terrier at her feet, was smelling at the reverend gentleman’s legs with a slow movement of his tail.

“The old dog likes me,” said the Rector; “they know a dog-lover when they see one wonderful creatures, dogs!  I’m sometimes tempted to think they may have souls!”

Mrs. Pendyce answered: 

“Horace says he’s getting too old.”

The dog looked up in her face, and her lip quivered.

The Rector laughed.

“Don’t you worry about that; there’s plenty of life in him.”  And he added unexpectedly:  “I couldn’t bear to put a dog away, the friend of man.  No, no; let Nature see to that.”

Over at the piano Bee and young Tharp were turning the pages of the “Saucy Girl”; the room was full of the scent of azaleas; and Mr. Barter, astride of a gilt chair, looked almost sympathetic, gazing tenderly at the old Skye.

Mrs. Pendyce felt a sudden yearning to free her mind, a sudden longing to ask a man’s advice.

“Oh, Mr. Barter,” she said, “my cousin, Gregory Vigil, has just brought me some news; it is confidential, please.  Helen Bellew is going to sue for a divorce.  I wanted to ask you whether you could tell me——­” Looking in the Rector’s face, she stopped.

“A divorce!  H’m!  Really!”

A chill of terror came over Mrs. Pendyce.

“Of course you will not mention it to anyone, not even to Horace.  It has nothing to do with us.”

Mr. Barter bowed; his face wore the expression it so often wore in school on Sunday mornings.

“H’m!” he said again.

It flashed through Mrs. Pendyce that this man with the heavy jowl and menacing eyes, who sat so square on that flimsy chair, knew something.  It was as though he had answered: 

“This is not a matter for women; you will be good enough to leave it to me.”

With the exception of those few words of Lady Malden’s, and the recollection of George’s face when he had said, “Oh yes, I see her now and then,” she had no evidence, no knowledge, nothing to go on; but she knew from some instinctive source that her son was Mrs. Bellew’s lover.

So, with terror and a strange hope, she saw Gregory entering the room.

“Perhaps,” she thought, “he will make Grig stop it.”

She poured out Gregory’s tea, followed Bee and Cecil Tharp into the conservatory, and left the two men together: