Chapter III

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      The door of Mrs. Tropenell's long low drawing-room opened very quietly, and Laura Pavely came through into the room.

      She had left a brightly lighted hall for a room of which the only present illumination radiated from a shaded reading lamp standing on a little table behind which sat her hostess. Thus, for perhaps as long as half a minute, Laura thought herself alone.

      During that half minute Mrs. Tropenell, with eyes well accustomed to the shaded light, gazed at her visitor with an eager, searching look, the look of one who wishes to see more, and to see further, than she has ever seen before.

      But what she saw—all she saw—was the Laura she knew with a knowledge that was at once so superficially close, and so little intimate. A woman whose stillness of manner—a manner which at times made her appear almost inanimate—covered, as Mrs. Tropenell had secret reason to know, an extraordinary force of negative will power. It was a force which had even pierced Godfrey Pavely's complacency, and shattered his firm belief in all the rights that English law bestows on the man who has the good or ill fortune to be a husband.

      As Laura advanced into the room her hostess saw that her visitor's beautifully shaped head, set proudly and freely on the slender shoulders, was thrown back in a characteristic gesture of attention, and, with a touch of reluctance, she admired afresh the masses of fair, cendré hair drawn back from the forehead in a way which to most women would have been trying, yet which to this woman lent an air of eighteenth-century charm and distinction.

      There was no colour in Laura Pavely's face, but her eyes, heavy-lidded, and fringed with eyelashes darker than her hair, were deeply blue.

      To-night she was wearing a very simple evening dress, a white chiffon tea-gown with a long black lace coat. The under dress was almost high to the throat, but beneath the black lace the wearer's arms, soft, dimpled, and rounded, were bare to the shoulder, and gleamed palely, revealingly.

      Mrs. Tropenell wondered whether Laura knew that her arms were unusually lovely; then, for she was a very honest woman, her conscience rebuked her. Laura's faults with regard to men were faults of omission, not of commission. Of course she was aware—she could not help being aware—that she was a singularly attractive and distinguished-looking creature. But she had always taken her own beauty, her own distinction, just as she did the rare, distinctive features of her garden, and the perhaps over-studied charm of her house—as something to be tended and kept beautiful, but also to be guarded from alien indifferent eyes.

      Perhaps because in these days every intelligent woman claims to be picturesque and witty—beauty, sheer beauty, is somewhat under the weather. Laura Pavely, to use the current jargon of her day, was not a "success." She was thought to be affected, "deep," prudish, whereas she was simply indifferent to the more commonplace human elements about her.

      Her marriage had withdrawn her from the circle of the old friends and neighbours among whom she had been brought up, in a measure because none of them could "do," excepting in a very casual and cursory sense, with Godfrey Pavely. The world of his youth, the little world in and about the country town of Pewsbury, to which he had introduced her as a bride with such exultant complacency, found her not only disagreeably superior, but also dull. Besides, during the early days of her marriage she had been too bewildered by the conditions of her new life, and of her relationship with her husband, to trouble about making new friends, or even new acquaintances.

      And so it was that in any intimate sense Mrs. Tropenell was still Laura's only close friend, but the younger woman was rather pathetically aware of how little she really possessed of the older woman's heart, how constantly she was compared, and ever to her detriment, to her dead mother, even how unconscious a rival in the older woman's favour was Laura's own child—merry, cheerful, loving little Alice.

      "Aunt Letty? I didn't see you were there."

      Laura Pavely had a delightful voice—low, clear, vibrating. It was a voice which sometimes seemed to promise more depth of feeling than its owner ever chose to betray.

      As she stooped to kiss Mrs. Tropenell, Laura let herself slide down on to the floor. She knelt there for a moment, and the light gleamed on her fair hair and upturned face. "Alice sent you her love," she said softly, "heaps of love. She's better to-night, though not quite well yet!" And then, as there came a sound of quick footsteps across the hall, she rose, and drew herself up to her full height, with the grace of movement and the absence of flurry which were both so characteristic of her.

      Mrs. Tropenell looked up quickly. Had Laura flushed, as she sometimes did flush, with a deep, unbecoming reddening of her pale face, when moved or startled? No, she seemed, if anything, paler, more impassive than usual, and Oliver's mother asked herself, yet again, what of late she had so often asked herself—if Laura was capable of any feeling, any passion, save a feeling of horror, a passion of repugnance, for aught which seemed to smirch her own fastidious physical and spiritual entity.

      That she loved her child, the high-spirited, happy-natured little girl, whose presence alone made life sweet and normal at Lawford Chase, Mrs. Tropenell could not doubt—she had had proof of how deeply Laura loved her child on the only occasion danger had come near to Alice—during a bout of some childish ailment, when for a few hours the little creature had been in danger of death. She, the older woman, had been frightened, awed, by Laura's terrible, dry-eyed agony....

      Oliver Tropenell opened the door, and as he walked across the room, his mother's heart quivered with jealous pain, and even with a feeling of secret, impotent anger, as she saw the eager, rapt look which lighted up his dark face.

      Laura held out her ringless right hand, but he only just touched it. "I'm sorry I'm late!" he exclaimed. "As a matter of fact I was reading a letter just come, by the second post, from Gillie."

      "I've written to Gillie to-day," Laura said quietly. It seemed such a long, long time since yesterday morning. She felt as if the extraordinary thing which had happened then had been blotted out.

      "Have you sent your letter off?"

      "No, not yet," she was surprised at the question.

      And then there fell a curious silence on those three people, till at last the door opened, and dinner was announced.

      "Oliver! Take in Laura," said Mrs. Tropenell.

      On the last occasion when the three had dined alone together there had been a little smiling discussion as to the order in which they should go into the dining-room. But that had been many weeks ago. They were not in such a light mood to-night, and yet—and yet, why should they not be? The hostess knew of no reason.

      The two paired off together, and Oliver's mother asked herself, for perhaps the thousandth time in the last three months, why she had allowed this—this friendship between her son and Laura Pavely to come about? It would have been so easy to arrange that she and her son should spend the summer abroad! When he had first come home there had been a talk of their going away together to Italy, or to France—France, which they had both loved when he was a clever, ardent, headstrong boy, with a strength