Читать книгу Miss Bunting онлайн

88 страница из 93

They were all silent for a moment, oppressed by the thought of a grief that no one could cure.

Anne was the first to speak.

"'Said heart of neither maid nor wife

To heart of neither wife nor maid,'"

she remarked with a kind of sad pride in having found the mot juste.

If Miss Bunting felt a shock at her literature-besotted pupil's highly inapt quotation, she was not the woman to show it.

"There is nothing that you can do," she said, looking round at a promising class. "You are doing all you can. The rest she will have to do for herself. I have seen it again and again in two wars. Come in now, Anne, it is getting chilly."

The one warm day of that summer was over. They all went back to the drawing-room, where Jane was describing with kind malice her visit to Mrs. Merivale at Valimere.

"Have you seen Mr. Adams about it yet, father?" she said to the Admiral.

The Admiral said he had spoken to Adams at the club, and he was coming out to see the lodgings.

"Oh, it was you who put Adams on to those rooms, Palliser," said Sir Robert. "He is like a clam--loves to make secrets about things. He was on the Silverbridge train with Dora and myself this afternoon, but he didn't say what he was up to. Mrs. Merivale's husband was in our office. Quite a good clerk, but would never have gone very far, even if he had lived. The sort of man who doesn't want responsibility."