To the North Read Free

current that set the furniture bobbing; at Rutland Gate destiny shadowed her tea-table. Her smallest clock struck portentously, her telephone trilled from the heart, her dinner-gong boomed a warning. When she performed introductions, drama’s whole precedent made the encounter momentous… . Only Sir Robert, who spent much of his time at his club, remained unaware of this atmosphere.
    Lady Waters had had no children by either, marriage. Her first had made her Cecilia’s aunt-in-law, her second, Emmeline’s first cousin once removed. Cecilia had met Henry Summers (Emmeline’s brother) for the first time dining at Rutland Gate. One was not a connection of Lady Waters’ for nothing; Cecilia had heard a good deal of Henry and Emmeline Summers, while they had had frequent occasion to smile at the name of their Cousin Robert’s new wife’s hypothetical niece, who was always abroad or had just left London. Then Cecilia and Henry, both bidden to dinner, had met: unconscious, chattering amiably while their relative’s large premonition darkened and spread above them, they became friends, intimates, lovers and quite soon afterwards married. That dangerous marriage was after Georgina Waters’ own heart: when, within less than a year, Henry died of pneumonia, she had to conceal her relief that, given Henry’s nervous make-up and Cecilia’s temperament, there had been no time for worse to come of it.
    That marriage so brief as hardly to lose its character of an event had transformed Cecilia from a young girl at once vehement and mysterious into a bewildered widow. She did not know where to turn. Incredulity, with which she had entered upon her happiness, remained the note of her grief. Emmeline Summers’ suggestion that they should set up a house together had worked out well. At that time both young women had found themselves solitary: Cecilia’s mother, never very affectionate, her whole heart given to her two sons killed in the war, had remarried soon after Cecilia met Henry and gone to live in America; Henry and Emmeline Summers had been orphans from childhood, with no relatives nearer, few friends more trusted, than Sir Robert Waters, their father’s cousin. They brought themselves up side by side, Henry some years ahead; very much alike, as though the same tree had divided. During the year of her brother’s marriage Emmeline, perhaps a little forlorn, had been much abroad; one might say that she and Cecilia had had hardly time to take stock of each other before their eyes met across a grave.
    Their views of life and their incomes combined comfortably; they did not ask too much of each other and from one happy point of departure both went their own ways. Emmeline had put some of her capital into a business, in connection with which she left home for most of the day; while many acquaintances and a quick succession of interests soon kept Cecilia once more amused and alert: she went out a good deal. Lady Waters, however, still viewed the arrangement with an unshaken mistrust. Women could not live together, sisters-in-law especially. How much did they speak of Henry, how lively a bond was their loss? While Lady Waters considered that unreserve, in other company than her own, must be debilitating, reticence could only be morbid. Painful expectancy, brought her frequently to their house; as they did not come to her with their troubles she came to them, and was their constant visitor. This they could think of no way to prevent.
    They had gone to live in St. John’s Wood, that airy uphill neighbourhood where the white and buff-coloured houses, pilastered or gothic, seem to have been built in a grove. A fragrant, faint impropriety, orris-dust of a century, still hangs over parts of this neighbourhood; glass passages lead in from high green gates, garden walls are mysterious, laburnums falling between the windows and walls have their own secrets. Acacias whisper at nights round airy, ornate little houses in which pretty women