So Nevill Tyson had left his wife. This was the most exciting act in the

drama that had entertained Drayton Parva for two years. He had brought

down the house. Presently it seemed that Drayton Parva was not unprepared

for the catastrophe. Miss Batchelor was sadly afraid that something of

this sort had been going on for long enough. But she had not condemned

Nevill Tyson wholesale and without a hearing; in these cases there are

always faults on both sides. A man as much in love with his wife as he

was would never have left her without some grounds. (I cannot think why

Miss Batchelor, being so clever, didn't see through Tyson; but there is

a point at which the cleverness of the cleverest woman ceases.) Anyhow,

if Mrs. Nevill Tyson was as innocent as one was bound to suppose, why did

she not come back to Drayton, to her mother? That was the proper thing

for her to do under the circumstances.

Have you ever sat by the seashore playing with pebbles in an idle mood?

You are not aiming at anything, you are much too lazy to aim; but some

god directs your arm, and, without thinking, you hit something that, ten

to one, you never would have hit if you had thought about it. After that

your peace is gone; you feel that you can never leave the spot till you

have hit that particular object again, with deliberate intent. So Miss

Batchelor, sitting by the shore of the great ocean of Truth, began by

throwing stones aimlessly about; and other people (being without sin)

picked them up and aimed them at Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Sometimes they hit

her, but more often they missed. They were clumsy. Then Miss Batchelor

joined in; and, because she found that she was more skillful than the

rest, she began, first to take a languid interest in the game, then to

play as if her life depended on it. She aimed with mathematical

precision, picking out all the tiny difficult places that other people

missed or grazed. Amongst them they had ended by burying Mrs. Nevill

Tyson up to her neck in a fairly substantial pile of pebbles. It only

needed one more stone to complete the work. Still, as I said before, Mrs.

Nevill Tyson's enemies were not particularly anxious to throw it.

This was reserved for another hand.

It was impossible for Mrs. Wilcox to live, even obscurely, in Drayton

Parva without hearing some garbled version of the current rumor. At first

she was a little shocked at finding her son-in-law under a cloud. But

if there is one truth more indisputable than another, it is that every

cloud has a handsome silver lining to it. (Though, indeed, from Mrs.

Wilcox's account of the matter, it was impossible to tell which was the

lining and which was the cloud.) The more she thought of it the more she

felt that there was nothing in it. There must be some misunderstanding

somewhere. Her optimism, rooted in ignorance, and watered with vanity,

had become a sort of hardy perennial.




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