"

"Yes, I know about it," said O'Bannon.

CHAPTER V

When Lydia came back from the Emmonses late Monday afternoon she brought
Bobby Dorset with her. Miss Bennett, who was arranging Morson's vases of
flowers according to her more fastidious ideas, heard them come in, as
noisy and high-spirited, she thought, as a couple of puppies. Lydia was
so busy giving orders to have Bobby's room got ready and to have Eleanor
telephoned to come over to dinner in case they wanted to play bridge,
and sending the car for her, because Eleanor was so near-sighted she
couldn't drive herself, and always let her chauffeur go home, and he had
no telephone--so incompetent of Eleanor--that Miss Bennett had no chance
to exchange a word with her. Besides, the poor lady was taken up with
the horror of the approaching bridge game. She liked a mild rubber now
and then, but not with Lydia, who scolded her after each hand,
remembering every play.

Lydia, who was almost without physical or moral timidity, was always
fighting against a subconscious horror, a repulsion rather than a fear,
that life was just a futile, gigantic, patternless confusion, a tale
told by an idiot, signifying nothing, which is the horror of all
materialists. When she walked into her bedroom and found her things laid
out just as usual, and a new maid--a Frenchwoman, brown and middle-aged
and competent--waiting for her, just as Evans had waited, one of her
moods of deep depression engulfed her, just as those who fear death are
sometimes brought to a realization of its approach by some everyday
symbol. Lydia did not fear death, but sometimes she hated life. She
never asked if it were her own relation to life that was unsatisfactory.

When she came downstairs in a tea gown of orange and brown chiffon no
one but Bobby noticed that her high spirits had all evaporated.

At table, before Morson and the footman, no one mentioned the subject of
the robbery, but when they were back in the drawing-room Miss Bennett
introduced it by asking: "Did the new woman hook you up right? Will she
do, dear?"

Lydia shrugged her shoulders, not stopping to think that Miss Bennett
had spent one whole day in intelligence offices and a morning on the
telephone in her effort to replace Evans.

The older woman was silenced by the shrug--not hurt, but
disappointed--and in the silence Bobby said: "Oh, what happened about
Evans? They took her away?"

Lydia answered, with a contemptuous raising