I gave it to her myself

With the luggage! So it was not a mere one-night visit. The blood rose slowly to Amherst's face. The footmen had disappeared, but presently the door at the back of the hall reopened, and one of them came out, carrying an elaborately-appointed tea-tray toward the smoking-room. The routine of the house was going on as if nothing had happened.... The butler looked at Amherst with respectful--too respectful--interrogation, and he was suddenly conscious that he was standing motionless in the middle of the hall, with one last intolerable question on his lips. Well--it had to be spoken! "Did Mrs. Amherst receive my telephone message?" "Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself." It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the smoking-room. "My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire; and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself, with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there will be some explanation----" But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal. Chapter 23 JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now, because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing; but it would be much nicer when Justine came back.... It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's letter as from an early chronicle.