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The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room. Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess.
"But she does," said Mrs. Vervain. Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid ring of the girl's praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution.
"Damn her!" he exploded so viciously that Anne jumped and cried out, "Mr. Dauntless!" "Oh, you feel just as I do about it only you won't say it aloud," he exclaimed. "I won't stand for it!" "I I am sure Miss Thursdale has done nothing to deserve your curses," she began diplomatically. "Good Heavens, Miss Courtenay, you Oh, I say, you know I didn't mean Eleanor. The old pelican that's the one.
Hooker had been employed in the nefarious at one time or another. "Detectives, Harry?" gasped Anne. "Why should there be detectives? We're not criminals." "You can't tell what Mrs. Thursdale may have done when she discovered- -Hello! There's a light down the road! 'Gad, I'll hide this lantern until we're sure." He promptly stuck the lantern inside his big raincoat and they were in darkness again.
The man who was going to marry Miss Thursdale and the man who wanted to marry her were advancing to shake hands a trifle awkwardly, perhaps, but more or less frankly. "Rough weather for motoring," remarked Dauntless, nervously. Windomshire removed his cap and goggles. "Beastly. I just ran over for something to warm the inside man. Won't you join me?"
It surprised Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon. Mrs. Vervain was at home as usual.
I must take my punishment alone." She drew her hand away, sighing. "Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you." "For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me." She shook her head with a slight laugh. "There will be no letter." Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look. "No letter? You don't mean "
"Miss Courtenay, too," murmured Eleanor, peeking under his arm. "Yes, by Jove," announced the harassed Englishman, at bay, "Windomshire and Miss Courtenay." There was a long silence a tableau, in fact. "Well, why doesn't some one say something? You've got us, don't you know." Eleanor Thursdale was the first to find words. She was faint with humiliation, but strong with the new resolve.
She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls. It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light.
The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using: it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast.
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