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Strefford flung away his cigar and turned to scrutinize her. "I don't see hanged if I do. What business is it of any of us, after all?" That, of course, was the old view that cloaked connivance in an air of decency. But to Susy it no longer carried conviction, and she hesitated. "If Nick should find out that I know...." "Good Lord doesn't he know that you know?
"I can't understand," Strefford objected, as they turned from her hotel door toward this obscure retreat, "why you insist on giving me bad food, and depriving me of the satisfaction of being seen with you. Why must we be so dreadfully clandestine? Don't people know by this time that we're to be married?" Susy winced a little: she wondered if the word would always sound so unnatural on his lips.
Strefford asked. "I don't know...." "Well, I do, then: you're afraid that, if Ellie and Nelson meet here, she'll blurt out something injudicious." "Oh, she won't!" Susy cried with conviction. "Well, then who will! I trust that superhuman child not to. And you and I and Nick " "Oh," she gasped, interrupting him, "that's just it. Nick doesn't know... doesn't even suspect. And if he did...."
Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the ache of the disappointment she had caused him; and yet conscious also that that very ache was not the overwhelming penetrating emotion he perhaps wished it to be, but a pang on a par with a dozen others; and that even while he felt it he foresaw the day when he should cease to feel it.
Come, give me a hand, Streff and you the other, Fred-" she began to hum the first bars of Donna Anna's entrance in Don Giovanni. "Pity I haven't got a black cloak and a mask...." "Oh, your face will do," said Strefford, laying his hand on her arm. She drew back, flushing crimson. Breckenridge and the Prince had sprung on ahead, and Gillow, lumbering after them, was already halfway up the stairs.
Well, it would all help to pass the day and by night he would have reached some kind of a decision about his future. On the third day after Nick's departure the post brought to the Palazzo Vanderlyn three letters for Mrs. Lansing. The first to arrive was a word from Strefford, scribbled in the train and posted at Turin.
For Strefford, in a mood of mischief, was no more to be trusted than a malicious child. Susy instantly resolved to risk speaking to him, if need be even betraying to him the secret of the letters. Only by revealing the depth of her own danger could she hope to secure his silence.
Susy read on the scroll beneath it: "The Hon'ble Diana Lefanu, fifteenth Countess of Altringham" and heard Strefford say: "Do you remember? It hangs where you noticed the empty space above the mantel-piece, in the Vandyke room. They say Reynolds stipulated that it should be put with the Vandykes."
He was a short round man, with a grizzled head, small facetious eyes and a large and credulous smile. At the luncheon table sat his wife, between Charlie Strefford and Nick Lansing. Next to Strefford, perched on her high chair, Clarissa throned in infant beauty, while Susy Lansing cut up a peach for her. Through wide orange awnings the sun slanted in upon the white-clad group. "Well well well!
Yes: to marry Strefford would give her that sense of self-respect which, in such a world as theirs, only wealth and position could ensure. If she had not the mental or moral training to attain independence in any other way, was she to blame for seeking it on such terms?
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