CHAPTER XX

"Toni, do you think it quite wise to go about so much with Mrs.

Herrick?"

It was Owen who asked the question one cold morning as the two sat at breakfast; and Toni looked up with something like defiance in her bright eyes.

"Why not, Owen? Oh, I know she has been--well, you know where--but she is free again now; and it is very hard if one mistake is to dog her footsteps wherever she goes for the rest of her life."

"It was a pretty serious mistake," Owen reminded her quietly, "and to tell you the truth I hardly like you to go about so constantly with a woman who did what she was proved to have done."

"Oh, don't be such a Pharisee, Owen." Toni spoke sharply and Owen glanced at her in dismay. "I suppose someone has been saying something to you. But I don't intend to give up Eva Herrick to please a lot of spiteful old women like Lady Martin and Mrs. Madgwick."

"Certainly one or two people have commented on your friendship," said Owen thoughtfully, "and I'm bound to say I don't like it myself. To begin with Mrs. Herrick treats her husband abominably; and I should not have thought you would have been attracted by her shallow, futile way of talking."

"You forget I'm shallow and futile myself," said Toni with a faint, bitter smile. "The gossips of the neighbourhood have long since decided that I was an ignorant little fool who wasn't fit to be the mistress of Greenriver; and I suppose it's a case of birds of a feather, isn't it?"

"Toni!" Owen's voice expressed bewilderment. "What on earth do you mean?

Who ever dared to say you weren't fit to be mistress of Greenriver?"

"Oh, heaps of people," said Toni recklessly. "You know quite well you were ashamed of me when we first went out to dinner parties here, and I didn't know how to behave--and lately we have been invited nowhere--not even to the Golf Club Ball."

Owen bit his lip. In truth the matter of the ball had puzzled him considerably. Although not a golfer, he was on friendly terms with many of the members of the local Club; and since Toni's friends, Mollie and Cynthia Teach, were ardent golfers, it had seemed most probable that Owen and his wife would receive an invitation to the annual ball.

The Tobies had indeed gone so far as to a.s.sure Toni of her invitation when first the ball was mentioned; and though as the day grew near the two girls grew uneasy when the topic was broached, Toni never dreamed that their avoidance of the subject covered a real and distressing awkwardness.

Certainly neither Toni nor Owen imagined that they had been quietly excluded from the list of guests; but such was the astounding fact, as Mollie and Cynthia were guiltily aware.

It was largely due to Lady Martin's plain-speaking that this came about.

Somehow the real truth about Eva Herrick had leaked out; as such truths do invariably leak out; and Toni's ill-advised friendship with Herrick's wife was easily turned to her disadvantage by so skilful an adversary as Lady Martin.

From the first her ladyship had been unable to bring herself to tolerate Toni; and had lost no opportunity of spreading abroad Toni's rash admission as to the nature of her cousin's employment--with the immediate result that in a good many people's eyes Toni herself was looked upon as an unusually fortunate shop-girl raised by a stroke of good luck to a position which she was quite unsuited to adorn.

Possibly there was in the case of some of her detractors an element of jealousy in their comments on Owen Rose's wife. There were a good many houses along the river where daughters were at a discount; and to see an unknown and attractive girl like Toni step into the place which many of these girls would have dearly liked to fill was doubtless somewhat galling.

At any rate Lady Martin found plenty of supporters when she broached her avowed intention of excluding Mrs. Rose from the ball of which she was patroness, on the ground of her friendship with the woman who had been, as they all knew, in prison for a serious offence; and so it happened that when the ball took place neither Owen nor Toni contributed by their presence to the success of the evening.

It was perfectly true that Toni had struck up a friendship with Jim Herrick's wife; and it is only fair to Toni to state that in the first instance she had made overtures to Eva Herrick from a purely good-hearted desire to return Herrick's kindness to her in the one way possible.

She was not, in truth, greatly attracted to Eva at first. She found her hard, bitter, at times ungenerous; but Mrs. Herrick was clever enough to see that such attributes failed to endear her to Toni; and since to Eva's perverted mind her husband's companionship was unendurable, she quickly determined to make a friend of this soft-hearted, unworldly little girl who was evidently sorry for her in her wordless fashion; and was too candid herself to suspect deceit or double-dealing in others.

Eva knew very well that the neighbourhood, which prided itself on its exclusiveness, would have little or nothing to do with her; and motor rides with Toni in the luxurious grey car, with lunch or tea at some riverside hotel, formed an agreeable method of pa.s.sing the days which were otherwise horribly long and empty.

"I wasn't thinking of the Golf Ball," Owen said, in reply to Toni's last speech. "But honestly, Toni, I don't care for Mrs. Herrick. Oh, I'm not talking now of the necklace affair. That's over and done with; but it's the woman herself I don't approve of."

"Why not?" She spoke abruptly and Owen frowned.

"Well, she's not the sort of girl I like my wife to be intimate with.

I'm sorry for that poor fellow Herrick. He is a sensible man, and knows that if his wife's past is to be forgotten it will be by living quietly and decently, and not by pushing into the society of the neighbourhood whether she is welcome or no."

"Owen, you're perfectly hateful." Toni was really angry. "She is always welcome here, anyway. You know quite well that no one round about really likes me. Oh, they call and all that sort of thing; but no one is really friendly to me, and all the time they are saying horrid things about me behind my back."

"I think you are talking nonsense, dear," said Owen quietly. "No one says horrid things. To begin with, what should they say?"

"They say I'm common and ignorant, and so I am," said Toni pa.s.sionately, with a sudden desire to blurt out the conversation she had overheard on that miserable day in August. "Mrs. Madgwick says so, and Lady Martin. I heard them--and lots of other people say so too. I thought it wasn't true at first--and then I saw it was. I asked Mr. Herrick, and he told me to read and educate myself and then I could be useful to you--and instead of that you went and got that perfectly hateful Miss Loder, and everyone knows it was because you were sick of me trying to help you and doing it so badly."

Owen's face as he listened to this speech was a study in bewilderment.

The introduction of Herrick's name puzzled him considerably; and although he frowned at Toni's description of Miss Loder, he realized that by some means Toni had been made unhappy over her own position as his wife.

"See here, Toni, I don't quite understand." He looked at her keenly.

"Who says you are ignorant--and all the rest? And what on earth has Herrick to do with our affairs?"

"I told him--he saw me crying and asked me why. It was at the Vicarage Bazaar--I was sitting in a summer-house and Lady Martin and Mrs.

Madgwick were outside, and they began to talk about me and they said all those horrible things----"

"Toni, were you obliged to listen? Couldn't you have got away!"

"No." She lifted her clear eyes to his and he repented his question. "I couldn't come out when they had begun; and I didn't know at first that they were talking secrets."

Her childish phraseology made Owen smile in the midst of his annoyance.

"So Mr. Herrick advised you to read? Well, Toni, that was good advice."

"Yes--and I took it," she said eagerly. "I read heaps and heaps of dull books and worked at French--and poetry--and then when I tried to help you, you wouldn't let me. You brought that horrid Loder here instead."

Her reiteration of Miss Loder's name jarred. Owen had been genuinely surprised and interested by this revelation, and if Toni had been wise enough to stick to her own side of the affair, it is probable she would have captured Owen's sympathy, and, incidentally, his heart; but she weakened her case by her senseless prejudice against Millicent Loder; and with a quick sense of irritation Owen told himself that she was only jealous--in a purely unsentimental way--after all.

She had never liked being ousted from her position, as would-be helper; but Owen knew--or fancied he did--the exact value of her aid; and after all his work was too important for him to run the risk of spoiling it by any lack of efficiency in his helpers.

"I wish you'd leave Miss Loder's name out of the question," he said at last, and his tone struck coldly on Toni's excited ear. "When the book is published I will dispense with her a.s.sistance, if you wish it; but until then I tell you frankly I intend to avail myself of her most valuable help."

He had expected an angry reply; but none came. Instead Toni said in a low voice:

"Very well, Owen. I know Miss Loder is useful to you and I am not. But if you refuse to let me help you, I don't think you can complain if I try to fill my time with other things--and if Mrs. Herrick is pleasant and nice to me I cannot very well refuse to know her, can I?"

"To know her? Certainly not--but there is a difference between knowing her casually and being with her all day long."

"I am not that," she replied quietly. "I take her motoring sometimes, because it is dull going alone, and it is a treat to her. But of course if you object--it is your car----"

"Oh, don't be silly, Toni." All Owen's pent-up irritation found vent in the words. "I'm not a dragon--or an ogre, am I? Take Mrs. Herrick by all means--have her here if you like, only for goodness' sake don't talk as though I wished to condemn you to perpetual loneliness."

"Very well. I won't." She rose as she spoke. "You've finished, haven't you? Then I'll go and see Mrs. Blades--she is ill again to-day, Kate says."

"Is she? Poor old soul." Owen rose too, and pa.s.sing round the table laid his hands on Toni's shoulders. "Toni, we're not quarrelling, are we?