ER XV

"Dear Mrs. Forrester, you know that I worship the ground she treads on,"
said Miss Scrotton; "but it can't be denied--can you deny it?--that
Mercedes is capricious."

It was one day only after Miss Scrotton's return from America and she
had returned alone, and it was to this fact that she alluded rather than
to the more general results of Madame von Marwitz's sudden postponement.
Owing to the postponement, Karen to-day was being married in Cornwall
without her guardian's presence. Miss Scrotton had touched on that. She
had said that she didn't think Mercedes would like it, she had added
that she couldn't herself, however inconvenient delay might have been,
understand how Karen and Gregory could have done it. But she had not at
first much conjecture to give to the bridal pair. It was upon the fact
that Mercedes, at the last moment, had thrown all plans overboard, that
she dwelt, with a nipped and tightened utterance and a gaze, fixed on
the wall above the tea-table, almost tragic. Mrs. Forrester was the one
person in whom she could confide. It was through Mrs. Forrester that she
had met Mercedes; her devotion to Mercedes constituted to Mrs.
Forrester, as she was aware, her chief merit. Not that Mrs. Forrester
wasn't fond of her; she had been fond of her ever since, as a relative
of the Jardines' and a precociously intelligent little girl who had
published a book on Port-Royal at the age of eighteen, she had first
attracted her attention at a literary tea-party. But Mrs. Forrester
would not have sat so long or listened so patiently to any other theme
than the one that so absorbed them both and that so united them in their
absorption. Miss Scrotton even suspected that a tinge of bland and
kindly pity coloured Mrs. Forrester's readiness to sympathize. She must
know Mercedes well enough to know that she could give her devotees bad
half hours, though the galling thing was to suspect that Mrs. Forrester
was one of the few people to whom she wouldn't give them. Mrs. Forrester
might worship as devoutly as anybody, yet her devotion never let her in
for so much forbearance and sacrifice. Perhaps, poor Miss Scrotton
worked it out, the reason was that to Mrs. Forrester Mercedes was but
one among many, whereas to herself Mercedes was the central prize and
treasure. Mrs. Forrester was incapable of a pang of jealousy or
emulation; she was always delighted yet never eager. When, in the first
flow of intimacy with Mercedes, Mis