She controlled the impulse to telephone to Eleanor Scrotton and consult with her; a vague instinct of loyalty towards Gregory restrained her from that. Eleanor would, in a day or two, hear from Cornwall and what she would hear could not be so bad as what Mrs. Forrester herself could tell her. After thinking for the rest of the morning, Mrs. Forrester decided to go and see Karen. She was not very fond of Karen. She had always been inclined to think that Mercedes exaggerated the significance of the girl's devotion, and Gregory's exaggeration, now, of her general significance--explicable as it might be in an infatuated young husband--disposed her the less kindly towards her. She felt that Karen had been clumsy, dull, in the whole affair. She felt that, at bottom, she was somewhat responsible for it. How had Gregory been able, living with Karen, to have formed such an insensate conception of Mercedes? The girl was stupid, acquiescent; she had shown no tact, no skill, no clarifying courage. Mrs. Forrester determined to show them all--to talk to Karen. She drove to St. James's at four o'clock that afternoon and Barker told her that Mrs. Jardine was in the drawing-room. Visitors, evidently, were with her, and it affected Mrs. Forrester very unpleasantly, as Barker led her along the passage, to hear rich harmonies of music filling the flat. She had expected to be perhaps ushered into a darkened bedroom; to administer comfort and sympathy to a shattered creature before administering reproof and counsel. But Karen not only was up; she was not alone. The strains were those of chamber-music, and a half-perplexed delight mingled with Mrs. Forrester's displeasure as she recognized the heavenly melodies of Schumann's Pianoforte Quintet. The performers were in the third movement. Karen rose, as Barker announced her, from the side of a stout lady at the piano, and Mrs. Forrester, nodding, her finger at her lips, dropped into a chair and listened. The stout lady at the piano had a pale, fat, pear-shaped face, her grizzled hair parted above it and twisted to a large outstanding knob behind. She wore eyeglasses and peered through them at her music with intelligent intensity and profound humility. The violin was played by an enormous young man with red hair, and the viola, second violin and 'cello by three young women, all of the black-and-tan Semitic type. Mrs. Forrester was too much preoccupied with her wonder to listen as she would have wished to, but by the time the end of the movement was come she had realized that they played extremely well. Karen came forward in the interval. She was undoubtedly pale and heavy-eyed; but in her little dress of dark blue silk, with her narrow lawn ruffles and locket and shining hair, she showed none of the desperate signs appropriate to her circumstances nor any embarrassment at the incongruous situation in which Mrs. Forrester found her.