There were sure to be extras.
Adela winced at the extras. Colonel Chart went to Paris and to Monte
Carlo and then to Madrid to see his boy. His daughter had the vision
of his perhaps meeting Mrs. Churchley somewhere, since, if she had
gone for a year, she would still be on the Continent. If he should
meet her perhaps the affair would come on again: she caught herself
musing over this. But he brought back no such appearance, and,
seeing him after an interval, she was struck afresh with his jilted
and wasted air. She didn't like it--she resented it. A little more
and she would have said that that was no way to treat so faithful a
man.
They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first days of
April she saw Mrs. Churchley in the Park. She herself remained
apparently invisible to that lady--she herself and Beatrice and
Muriel, who sat with her in their mother's old bottle-green landau.
Mrs. Churchley, perched higher than ever, rode by without a
recognition; but this didn't prevent Adela's going to her before the
month was over. As on her great previous occasion she went in the
morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted. This
time, however, her visit was shorter, and a week after making it--the
week was a desolation--she addressed to her brother at Madrid a
letter containing these words: "I could endure it no longer--I
confessed and retracted; I explained to her as well as I could the
falsity of what I said to her ten months ago and the benighted purity
of my motives for saying it.
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