Again Dr. Willoughby smiled his mischievous smile. “You think of a man of my profession as outside politics, I expect, but that only shows that you too are an innocent. We’re all engaged in politics in one way or another, Mrs. Ferrier. It’s a political age.”

“Oh dear,” she sighed, “I suppose it is. I hate it all so.” It was time, she thought, that she went about the business of the casket and she looked at her watch rather nervously. But Dr. Willoughby was warming to his subject. She half listened, missed the first half of the sentence and heard him say only, “I have a good deal more respect for Orlando Fosca than for some members of my congregation, as a matter of fact.”

“Because he’s not afraid?” she asked quickly, for she felt again the slight pressure behind the words.

“Because he lives what he believes.”

“I see.” Isabel knew that sooner or later she would be accused, of what she did not know, but of something. Now she began to realize what it would be. In the last hour she had seen Edward raised up into a communion from which she and her husband, regular churchgoers, had shut themselves out. “The communion of saints on earth,” she said with a shade of irony. “Are the Phillipses like that too?”

“Oh, Damon Phillips,” Dr. Willoughby said quickly, “is a different kind of man altogether, brilliant in his field, which happens to be physics. Phillips is a restless man.” It seemed that he might have said something less charitable but checked himself. “A most likable chap, with a wonderful wife, as perhaps you saw last night. Yes, you really had better be on your way,” he said. “I’ll just call a cab.”

Isabel drew on her gloves. She was beginning to see that she had come into a world where people were concerned with things that she and Henry never thought about at all. She had come unarmed into a place where the pressures were very great and were pressures of a kind that she had never even imagined. How would she ever come through safe, unharmed?

“Don’t let them scare you, Mrs. Ferrier,” Dr. Willoughby said unexpectedly as he came back.

“I am scared,” she confessed, “very. But I expect I shall learn a great deal. How can I thank you?” She gave him her gloved hand.

VII

VII