walked away.

CHAPTER XXVII

Mrs. Forrester remained among her canaries and jonquils, thinking. She
was seriously perturbed. She was, as she had said, fond of Gregory, but
she was fonder, far, of Mercedes von Marwitz, whom Gregory had caused to
suffer and whom he would, evidently, cause to suffer still more.

She controlled the impulse to telephone to Eleanor Scrotton and consult
with her; a vague instinct of loyalty towards Gregory restrained her
from that. Eleanor would, in a day or two, hear from Cornwall and what
she would hear could not be so bad as what Mrs. Forrester herself could
tell her. After thinking for the rest of the morning, Mrs. Forrester
decided to go and see Karen. She was not very fond of Karen. She had
always been inclined to think that Mercedes exaggerated the significance
of the girl's devotion, and Gregory's exaggeration, now, of her general
significance--explicable as it might be in an infatuated young
husband--disposed her the less kindly towards her. She felt that Karen
had been clumsy, dull, in the whole affair. She felt that, at bottom,
she was somewhat responsible for it. How had Gregory been able, living
with Karen, to have formed such an insensate conception of Mercedes? The
girl was stupid, acquiescent; she had shown no tact, no skill, no
clarifying courage. Mrs. Forrester determined to show them all--to talk
to Karen.

She drove to St. James's at four o'clock that afternoon and Barker told
her that Mrs. Jardine was in the drawing-room. Visitors, evidently, were
with her, and it affected Mrs. Forrester very unpleasantly, as Barker
led her along the passage, to hear rich harmonies of music filling the
flat. She had expected to be perhaps ushered into a darkened bedroom; to
administer comfort and sympathy to a shattered creature before
administering reproof and counsel. But Karen not only was up; she was
not alone. The strains were those of chamber-music, and a half-perplexed
delight mingled with Mrs. Forrester's displeasure as she recognized the
heavenly melodies of Schumann's Pianoforte Quintet. The performers were
in the third movement.

Karen rose, as Barker announced her, from the side of a stout lady at
the piano, and Mrs. Forrester, nodding, her finger at her lips, dropped
into a chair and listened.

The stout lady at the piano had a pale, fat, pear-shaped face, her
grizzled hair parted above it and twisted to a large outstanding knob
behind. She wore eyeglasses and p