gined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know
what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at Christchurch, and whom
they both liked very well. The case occupied three days, and the report
that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day. Edward, however,
kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in
his gun-room, and when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to
that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read.
It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one
counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr Brand
upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of the bedroom
accommodation at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court.
She did not even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain
occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it
appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy
themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that
one of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so insistently and so
impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton
of Ringwood very well--a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white
fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he did not love Miss Lupton.... Well,
of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might
as well think of Uncle Edward loving... loving anybody but Leonora. When
people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt,
people who misbehaved--but they were poor people--or people not like
those she knew. So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's mind.
But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to confess to a
"guilty intimacy" with some one or other. Nancy imagined that he must
have been telling some one his wife's secrets; she could not
understand why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very
gentlemanly--it lessened her opinion of Mrs Brand. But since she found
that Mrs Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could
not have been very serious secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then,
suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr Brand--the mild
Mr Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to
Nauheim, playing "Blind Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his
wife when he caught her--Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst
possible terms. That was i