So
Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm for the
catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he
certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he
wondered much in what form it would find its liveliest effect.
Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal--a frightened sauve
qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they were less
elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they
didn't find. The Dorringtons hadn't re-appeared, the princes had
scattered; wasn't that the beginning of the end? Mrs. Moreen had lost
her reckoning of the famous "days"; her social calendar was blurred--it
had turned its face to the wall. Pemberton suspected that the great, the
cruel discomfiture had been the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who
seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they
wanted. He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his
retreat, which was never the path of a return.
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