“What a relief,” sighed Mrs. Stapleton. “I thought we had lost him.”
The three were sitting once again in Lady Laura’s drawing room soon after lunch. Mr. Vincent had just looked in with Laurie’s note to give the news. It was a heavy fog outside, woolly in texture and orange in color, and the tall windows seemed opaque in the lamplight; the room, by contrast, appeared a safe and pleasant refuge from the reek and stinging vapor of the street.
Mrs. Stapleton had been lunching with her friend. The Colonel had returned for Christmas, so his wife’s duties had recalled her for the present from those spiritual conversations which she had enjoyed in the autumn. It was such a refreshment, she had said with a patient smile, to slip away sometimes into the purer atmosphere.
Mr. Vincent folded the letter and restored it to his pocket.
“We must be careful with him,” he said. “He is extraordinarily sensitive. I almost wish he were not so developed. Temperaments like his are apt to be thrown off their balance.”
Lady Laura was silent.
For herself she was not perfectly happy. She had lately come across one or two rather deplorable cases. A very promising girl, daughter of a publican in the suburbs, had developed the same kind of powers, and the end of it all had been rather a dreadful scene in Baker Street. She was now in an asylum. A friend of her own, too, had lately taken to lecturing against Christianity in rather painful terms. Lady Laura wondered why people could not be as well balanced as herself.