figures rose, looked toward him, passed and swam and mixed around him in a blur of names and moon-white faces and politely murmured words. Then all the figures resolved themselves again into their former positions; he was standing beside Joel’s mother, looking at her with a helpless and bewildered face; she put one hand swiftly, lightly on his arm, and in a kind and quiet voice said to him: “You sit down here, next to me.”
Then she sat down again in her chair—a big, wicker chair with a vast, fan-shaped back, he sat down beside her, and sank gratefully into oblivion while the other people resumed their interrupted conversation.
“No, but—Polly! Surely not! You know, she actually did not go through with it?” said a strong, protesting voice, in which yet an eager curiosity was evident. “You know, they stopped the thing before she went the whole way?”
“My dear,” said Polly firmly—she had evidently been well named: in the moonlight her face showed sharp and pointed, with a big nose, and the shrewd, witty, and rather malicious features of a parrot—“my dear, I know she did. I was visiting Alice Bellamy at Newport when it happened: I got the whole story straight from her. The family were perfectly frantic—they were calling Hugh Bellamy up or running in to see him a dozen times a day to find out if something could be done—how to get it annulled—But I tell you,” Polly cried, shaking her head obstinately and speaking in a tone of unmistakable conviction, “—I know what I’m talking about! There’s no doubt about it whatever—she married him—the ceremony was actually performed—”
“And she really lived with him—with this—this stable-boy?”
“Lived with him!” Polly cried. “My dear, they’d been living together for almost two weeks before old Dick Rossiter found them. Now, of course,” she said piously, but with a faint, malicious smirk, “—I don’t know what they’d been doing all that time—perhaps the whole affair had been quite idyllic, but—well, my dear, you can use your own imagination. My own experience with ostlers is rather limited, but I shouldn’t think they were particularly renowned for their platonic virtues.”
“No,” said Mrs. Pierce quietly, but with an unmistakable note of level and obdurate cynicism in her voice, “—nor Ellen Rossiter either—not if I know the breed!… After all,” she went on in a moment, in a voice that was characterized by its grimly quiet conviction, “what else could you expect out of that crowd?… There’s bad blood there! Bad
