There had been rain in the
night, and the trees were still dripping. Presently, however,
there appeared in the laden haze a watery patch of blue: and
through this crevice in the clouds the sun, diffidently at first
but with gradually increasing confidence, peeped down on the
fashionable and exclusive turf of Grosvenor Square. Stealing
across the square, its rays reached the massive stone walls of
Drexdale House, until recently the London residence of the earl
of that name; then, passing through the window of the
breakfast-room, played lightly on the partially bald head of Mr.
Bingley Crocker, late of New York in the United States of
America, as he bent over his morning paper. Mrs. Bingley Crocker,
busy across the table reading her mail, the rays did not touch.
Had they done so, she would have rung for Bayliss, the butler, to
come and lower the shade, for she endured liberties neither from
Man nor from Nature.
Mr. Crocker was about fifty years of age, clean-shaven and of a
comfortable stoutness. He was frowning as he read. His smooth,
good-humoured face wore an expression which might have been
disgust, perplexity, or a blend of both. His wife, on the other
hand, was looking happy. She extracted the substance from her
correspondence with swift glances of her compelling eyes, just as
she would have extracted guilty secrets from Bingley, if he had
had any. This was a woman who, like her sister Nesta, had been
able all her life to accomplish more with a glance than other
women with recrimination and threat.
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