"We are almost tired of waiting for you, good people," she began merrily. "Fortunately it is fine and warm, or we should have gone and left you to your own devices, as Mr. Brooke and Rosalind have done."
"Where have they gone?" asked Maurice.
"Walked off to her house. Miss Brooke is at home. Lesley, you are an imposition! Think of having a voice like that, and keeping it dark all this time."
"We shall requisition Miss Brooke for the club very often, I know that," said Maurice.
"You'll come in with us, Lesley?" Ethel asked.
"No, thank you, Ethel. Not to-day. Thanks."
She wondered a little nervously why Oliver was looking so vexed and—yes, so miserable, too! He seemed terribly out of spirits. Had he and Ethel quarrelled? The thought gave a look of tender inquiry to her eyes as she held out her hand to him. And on meeting that sweet glance, Oliver's face brightened. He had been feeling an unreasonable annoyance with her for walking home with Maurice Kenyon, and had even in his heart called her "a little French flirt." Though why it should matter to him that she was a flirt, did not exactly appear.
They said good-bye to each other, and separated. Maurice went off to see a patient; Oliver accompanied Ethel to her own house; Lesley entered her own home.
She was alone for an hour or two, and, to tell the truth, she felt rather dull. Miss Brooke went away to her circle of select souls, and her father, as she knew, had gone to Mrs. Romaine's. She took out her much-prized volume of "The Unexplored," and began to read it again; wishing that she could talk to her mother about it, and explain to her how really great and good a man her father was. For—she had got as far as this—she was sure that her mother did not understand him. It would have been impossible for him to do a mean, a cruel, a dishonorable action. There had been a misunderstanding somewhere; and Lesley wished, with her whole soul, that she could clear it up.
The sound of the opening and closing of the front door did not arouse her from her dreams. She read on, holding the little paper-covered volume on her lap, deep in deepest thought, until the door of the drawing-room opened rather suddenly, and her father walked in.