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"The real reason is that you're not Nick" was what she would have said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare truth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute not to read that into it. "He'll think it's because I'm still in love with Nick... and perhaps I am.
What's wrong? You mean because of her giving up Clarissa?" "Not that only.... You don't know.... I can't tell you...." She shivered at the memory, and rose restlessly from the bench where they had been sitting. Strefford gave his careless shrug. "Well, my dear, you can hardly expect me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owed the luck of being so long alone with you in Venice.
"Ask Nick, my dear fellow," Strefford answered for her; and: "By the way, where is Nick if one may ask?" young Breckenridge interposed, glancing up to take belated note of his host's absence. "Dining out," said Susy glibly. "People turned up: blighting bores that I wouldn't have dared to inflict on you." How easily the old familiar fibbing came to her!
They were awfully kind to Nick when he went to India with them, and they're so simple-minded that they would expect him to be glad to see them." Strefford aimed his cigarette-end at a tourist on a puggaree who was gazing up from his guidebook at the palace. "Ah," he murmured with satisfaction, seeing the shot take effect; then he added: "Coral Hicks is growing up rather pretty."
I'd rather like her to know that...." "I'll tell her, Nelson," she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to her dreary room. Susy's one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of "nerves" to be jested away.
But she still continued to treat him as she had always treated the Strefford of old, Charlie Strefford, dear old negligible impecunious Streff; and he wanted to show her, ever so casually and adroitly, that the man who had asked her to marry him was no longer Strefford, but Lord Altringham.
At any rate there was no use in letting her thoughts wander back to that shattered fool's paradise of theirs. Only, as she sat there and reckoned up the days till Strefford arrived, what else in the world was there to think of? Her future and his? But she knew that future by heart already!
Meanwhile, in spite of all that she packed into them, the days passed more and more slowly, and the excitements she had counted on no longer excited her. Strefford was hers: she knew that he would marry her as soon as she was free.
Vanderlyn and Clarissa left betimes the next morning; and Mrs. Vanderlyn, who was to start for St. Moritz in the afternoon, devoted her last hours to anxious conferences with her maid and Susy. Strefford, with Fred Gillow and the others, had gone for a swim at the Lido, and Lansing seized the opportunity to get back to his book.
She had meant to tell Strefford the whole story; it had been one of her chief reasons for wishing to see him again, and half-unconsciously, perhaps, she had hoped, in his laxer atmosphere, to recover something of her shattered self-esteem. But now she suddenly felt the impossibility of confessing to anyone the depths to which Nick's wife had stooped.
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