"Ah!" she cried, with her usual buoyant air. "You truant! We've all been wondering what had become of you. Busy, of course! Always the same excuse! Find something fresh. You used it a fortnight ago to refuse my invitation to take pot-luck with us."
I laughed at her unconventional greeting, replying, "If I say something fresh it must be a lie. You know, Mrs. Henniker, how hard I'm kept at it, with hospital work and private practice."
"That's all very well," she said, with a slight pout of her well-shaped mouth--for she was really a pretty woman, even though full of airs and caprices. "But it doesn't excuse you for keeping away from us altogether."
"I don't keep away altogether," I protested. "I've called now."
She pulled a wry face, in order to emphasise her dissatisfaction at my explanation, and said:
"And I suppose you are prepared to receive castigation? Ethelwynn has begun to complain because people are saying that your engagement is broken off."
"Who says so?" I inquired rather angrily, for I hated all the tittle-tattle of that little circle of gossips who dawdle over the tea-cups of Redcliffe Square and its neighbourhood. I had attended a good many of them professionally at various times, and was well acquainted with all their ways and all their exaggerations. The gossiping circle in flat-land about Earl's Court was bad enough, but the Redcliffe Square set, being slightly higher in the social scale, was infinitely worse.
"Oh! all the ill-natured people are commenting upon your apparent coolness. Once, not long ago, you used to be seen everywhere with Ethelwynn, and now no one ever sees you. People form a natural conclusion, of course," said the fair-haired, fussy little woman, whose married state gave her the right to censure me on my neglect.
"Ethelwynn is, of course, still with you?" I asked, in anger that outsiders should seek to interfere in my private affairs.
"She still makes our house her home, not caring to go back to the dulness of Neneford," was her reply. "But at present she's away visiting one of her old schoolfellows--a girl who married a country banker and lives near Hereford."
"Yes, she went three days ago. I thought she had written to you. She told me she intended doing so."