really seemed
to think that she would like to get away. Karen believed that Mrs.
Talcott had actually been feeling lonely, uncharacteristic as that
seemed. She would probably bring her back on Saturday. The letter ended:
"My dear husband, your loving Karen."

Mrs. Talcott, therefore, was expected, and Mrs. Barker was told to make
ready for her.

But on Saturday morning, when Karen was starting, he had a wire from her
telling him that plans were altered and that she was coming back alone.

He went to meet her at Paddington, remembering the meeting when she had
come up after their engagement. It was a different Karen, a Karen furred
and finished and nearly elegant, who stepped from the train; but she
had, as then, her little basket with the knitting and the book; and the
girlish face was scarcely altered; there was even a preoccupation on it
that recalled still more vividly the former meeting at Paddington.
"Well, dearest, and why isn't Mrs. Talcott here, too?" were his first
words.

Karen took his arm as he steered her towards the luggage. "It is only
put off, I hope, that visit," she said, "because I heard this morning,
Gregory, and wired to you then, that Tante asks if she may come to us
next week." Her voice was not artificial; it expressed determination as
well as gentleness and seemed to warn him that he must not show her if
he were not pleased. Yet duplicity, in his unpleasant surprise, was
difficult to assume.

"Really. At last. How nice," he said; and his voice rang oddly. "But
poor old Mrs. Talcott. Madame von Marwitz didn't know, I suppose," he
went on, "that we'd just been planning to have her?"

Karen, her arm still in his, stood looking over the heaped up luggage
and now pointed out her box to the porter. Then, as they turned away and
went towards their cab, she said, more gently and more determinedly:
"Yes; she did know we had planned it. I wrote and told her so, and that
is why she wrote back so quickly to ask if we could not put off Mrs.
Talcott for her; because she will be leaving London very soon and it
will be, this next week, her only chance of being with us. Mrs. Talcott
did not mind at all. I don't think she really wanted to come so much,
Gregory. It is as Tante says, you know," Karen settled herself in a
corner of the hansom, "she really does not like leaving Les Solitudes."

Gregory had the feeling of being enmeshed. Why had Madame von Marwitz
thrown this web? Had she really divined in a f