not much good to her after all, for she did not dare to wear them,
lest Jack should ask awkward questions concerning the source from
whence they came.
"I never can do anything I like," said Bella with a pout.
And then there came a night when John Chetwynd found the pretty
drawing-room deserted and his wife flown.
The hours went by and as she did not return he grew seriously uneasy.
Where could she be? When eleven o'clock struck he put on his hat and,
terribly though it went against the grain, started for Holly
Street--she might be at her mother's.
No, Mrs. Blackall had not seen her, she said; and she looked
searchingly into her son-in-law's face as she spoke. "Did Dr.
Chetwynd really not know where she was?"
"No, madam, or assuredly I should not be here."
The doctor spoke with some heat; that there was something behind all
this was very evident, and he naturally objected to being made a fool
of.
"You don't know, then, that Bella is on at the Tivoli?"
John Chetwynd sat down suddenly. This news literally took his breath
away.
It was not possible that Bella had taken such a step without his
knowledge or sanction. He looked up with such hopeless misery written
in his white face that Mrs. Blackall could not help a certain pity
for her son-in-law, although in her opinion he had brought the thing
upon himself, and the very compassion she felt for his suffering had
the effect of making her more harsh and unsympathetic.
"What did you expect?" she asked. "As a man of the world could you
really imagine that a young, high-spirited girl like my daughter
would content herself with the life you tried to chain her down to?
She had had just taste enough of the admiration and applause of a
public life to get a liking for it, and in an instant it is all taken
away and nothing given her in its place. It ain't commonsense, it--"
"It may not be," said Chetwynd wearily; "but there are women
nevertheless to whom home and husband are all-sufficient and who ask
for nothing beyond."
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