Why had she returned to this particular neighbourhood--like the wounded animal creeping back to the place it used to haunt before, largely straying, it received its wounds? As though exhausted by rebellious originality she seemed meekly to have surrendered to the force of habit. Or perhaps when the cab-driver asked where he should take her she had said Kensington as the only name of a locality belonging to this hemisphere that she could remember in her great weariness. Because the effort required for thinking hard was just now impossible, because nothing that concerned herself personally was any longer of the least consequence; because one place was the same to her as another, since more than half of the world had become quite empty and she was condemned to live alone in it?
She mingled with the small stream of worshippers passing beneath the drip of the trees by the blank wall of the Oratory, threaded her way past two or three broughams regretfully brought there by devout masters or mistresses who could not walk but hated troubling their stable on the day of rest, and then just outside the church door she came almost face to face with her parents.
Sweeping into the sacred edifice, they both cut her--Mr. Verinder in the manner known as dead; Mrs. Verinder with a vacillation of gait, a fluttering of furs and feathers, the first rough sketch of a gesture, and a look. It was in its essence a look that Emmie had often seen at home; the look that came when servants had committed an accident with valuable glass or rare porcelain, angry but not really inexorable, seeming to say: “I _cannot_ ignore it. You have broken our hearts, and we are very much annoyed.”
In spite of the disastrous turn of events that occurred last August, Mr. and Mrs. Verinder throughout the month and during half of September were still sustained by a modified form of hope, and still making strenuous efforts to conceal the disgrace that had befallen them. They felt that they were engaged in a contest with time. If they could “hush things up” until their enemy went back to the wilds no one need know of this truly _fin-de-siècle_ escapade, and Emmeline need not be given that horrible up-to-date label of “The woman who did.” Dyke was leaving England about the middle of September--really going--no doubt of it. Not only the newspapers said so, but Mr. Verinder--without the aid of detectives--had assured himself of the truth. When once Dyke was gone all would be over; Emmeline would come to her senses, rub her eyes as one awakening from an ugly delirium, and be very grateful to find her reputation still intact. They could then do anything they liked with her--for instance, marry her to that old widower who hired the Grosvenor Gallery for his concert, and thus, as Mr. Verinder put it, “save her from her temperament.”