Chance

General considerations never had the power to trouble Mrs. Fyne much. The

girl not being in a state to be questioned she waited by the bedside.

Fyne had crossed over to the house, his scruples overcome by his anxiety

to discover what really had happened. He did not have to lift the

knocker; the door stood open on the inside gloom of the hall; he walked

into it and saw no one about, the servants having assembled for a fatuous

consultation in the basement. Fyne's uplifted bass voice startled them

down there, the butler coming up, staring and in his shirt sleeves, very

suspicious at first, and then, on Fyne's explanation that he was the

husband of a lady who had called several times at the house--Miss de

Barral's mother's friend--becoming humanely concerned and communicative,

in a man to man tone, but preserving his trained high-class servant's

voice: "Oh bless you, sir, no! She does not mean to come back. She told

me so herself"--he assured Fyne with a faint shade of contempt creeping

into his tone.

As regards their young lady nobody downstairs had any idea that she had

run out of the house. He dared say they all would have been willing to

do their very best for her, for the time being; but since she was now

with her mother's friends . . .

He fidgeted. He murmured that all this was very unexpected. He wanted

to know what he had better do with letters or telegrams which might

arrive in the course of the day.

"Letters addressed to Miss de Barral, you had better bring over to my

hotel over there," said Fyne beginning to feel extremely worried about

the future. The man said "Yes, sir," adding, "and if a letter comes

addressed to Mrs. . . . "

Fyne stopped him by a gesture. "I don't know . . . Anything you like."

"Very well, sir."

The butler did not shut the street door after Fyne, but remained on the

doorstep for a while, looking up and down the street in the spirit of

independent expectation like a man who is again his own master. Mrs.

Fyne hearing her husband return came out of the room where the girl was

lying in bed. "No change," she whispered; and Fyne could only make a

hopeless sign of ignorance as to what all this meant and how it would

end.

He feared future complications--naturally; a man of limited means, in a

public position, his time not his own. Yes. He owned to me in the

parlour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the

possible consequences. But as he was making this artless confession I

said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might

have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could

never, never have presented itself to his mind. Slow but sure (for I

conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning

to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years--and

now it had come. The complication was there! I looked at his unshaken

solemnity with the amused pity we give the victim of a funny if somewhat

ill-natured practical joke.