The entrance of some one brought Brooke to herself, a shrill voice that replied in a high key to the answer of the maid, “In the den? Then we’ll go right in very informally, no need to take the cards,” and Mrs. Ashton, followed by a married daughter, entered quite abruptly, the elder lady looking at the two women with something akin to disapproval on her florid face, an expression that Brooke interpreted instantly. Mrs. Ashton was becoming bored at the situation and had a feeling of resentment that all her opportunities of becoming the patroness of the Lawtons were vanishing.
She still had one more card to play, a trump she considered it, and she suddenly drew it from the pack and cast it before Mrs. Lawton. A widower, more than passing rich, though not of her precise set, with two daughters just leaving school, had intrusted her to find a well-bred New Yorker as chaperon and companion to travel with them until the next autumn, and then launch them tactfully in the Whirlpool. Any reasonable salary might be demanded—would dear Pamela like the chance? Six or eight months abroad would doubtless restore her tone and spirits.
Brooke’s eyes flashed fire, Scotch fire not easily put out when once it was kindled; but Mrs. Lawton only grew a shade more pale, and said in her soft, slow accent, looking steadily at her friend, “Susan, you are forgetting Adam. How could I both go abroad and give him the care he will always need while he lives?”
For some reason the soft answer not only did not turn away wrath, but augmented it, and shortly the couple left; but alas for the treachery of portières—scarcely were the pair in the hall when, forgetting that it was not a door that closed behind them, Mrs. Ashton said, in an echoing whisper, “Care, while he lives indeed—it’s just as I said the other day, if Adam Lawton had only died at once and had done with it, those women, instead of being beggars, could have lived in luxury on his life insurance!”
With the harsh, insistent vibration of a graphophone, the words stung the ears of mother and daughter, who were standing where their guests had left them. A look of horror froze Mrs. Lawton’s face to the immobility of a statue, while in Brooke’s brain, still tingling with the other blow, the thoughts were suddenly clarified as if by fire, and she never noticed that the Cub had come in and was looking from one to the other in alarm.