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He took good care to go before you got home too. Miss LeMar entertained him. I guess she was quite capable of it." Estella bent over her dishes in silence. Her face was deadly white. "I'll send her away," said Mrs. Bowes pityingly. "When she's gone, Spencer will soon come back to you." "No, you won't!" said Estella fiercely.
She looked straight in Spencer Morgan's honest blue eyes and read there the young man's dazzled admiration. There was contempt in the look she turned on Estella. "You were singing when we came in," said Spencer. "Won't you go on, please? I am very fond of music." Miss LeMar turned again to the organ. The gleaming curves of her neck and shoulders rose out of their filmy sheathings of lace.
"Oh," she cried with a toss of her head, "it's not me you want it's Miss LeMar, isn't it? She's away at the shore. You'll find her there, I dare say." Still, in spite of all, she perversely hoped. If he would only make any sign, the least in the world, that he was sorry that he still loved her she could forgive him everything.
It seemed to make everything so horribly sure. "I guess I had a right to listen, hadn't I, with such goings on in my own house? You're a little fool, Estella Bowes! I don't believe that LeMar girl is a bit better than she ought to be. I wish I'd never taken her to board, and if you say so, I'll send her packing right off and not give her a chance to make mischief atween folks."
Until it does let us make the most of it while it lasts." He said the words bitterly. Constance was confirmed in her original suspicion of him now. Halsey was getting deeper and deeper into the moral quagmire. She had seen his interest in Mrs. Noble. Had Bella LeMar hoped that she, too, would play will-o '-the-wisp in leading him on? Over the still half-eaten supper she watched Halsey keenly.
They were risking everything, perhaps even honor itself, on a turn of a wheel, the fall of a card, a guess on a horse. Why had Bella LeMar invited her here? she asked herself. At first Constance was a little bit afraid that she might have plunged into too deep water. She made up her mind to quit when her losses reached a certain nominal point. But they did not reach it.
There was a little mocking smile on her lovely face. "Miss LeMar," said Estella in a quivering voice, "what do you mean by all this? You know I'm engaged to Spencer Morgan!" Miss LeMar laughed softly. "Really? If you are engaged to the young man, my dear Miss Bowes, I would advise you to look after him more sharply. He seems very willing to flirt, I should say."
Inside there appeared a fine wire on a spool which unwound gradually by clockwork, and, after passing through a peculiar small arrangement, was wound up on another spool. Flexible silk-covered copper wires led from the box. Carefully Constance reached across the dizzy intervening space, and drew in the slack LeMar telephone wires.
Deliberately she opened the box, disclosing two spools of wire inside. To the machine she attached several head pieces such as a telephone operator wears. She turned a switch and the wire began to unroll from one spool and wind up on the other again. A voice, or rather voices, seemed to come from the box itself. It was uncanny. "Hello, is this Mrs. LeMar?" came from it.
She was too angry to cry or to realize what had happened, and still kept hoping all sorts of impossible things as she sat by her window. It was ten o'clock when Spencer went away and Vivienne LeMar passed up the hall to her room. Estella clenched her hands in an access of helpless rage. She was very angry, but under her fury was a horrible ache of pain.
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