"And your keys?"
"Keys?"
"Your own bunch?"
"Oh, I left them—somewhere. In my dressing-table drawer, I think."
Nigel pulled Daisy into the shelter of the porch, and Fulvia was gone.
Daisy danced from one foot to the other.
"What fun!" she said, chuckling. "Fulvia looks as dismal as if she never would see you again. Just for one afternoon! Well, I don't mind now about the rain. I've something nice to do."
Daisy had noted that morning the handsome silver-mounted dressing-box, Mr. Carden-Cox's birthday gift, standing on the side-table in Fulvia's room—not the little back room, but the pleasant front one, for Nigel had settled that point. Beside the new box was the shabby old dressing-case, and Daisy, having used curious fingers and eyes, discovered that the latter was locked, the former unlocked and empty. Thereupon she conceived the idea of emptying the old box into the now, as a pleasant rainy-day occupation. Daisy was not sensitive as to associations, or she might have shrunk, as Fulvia had shrunk, from bringing forward the gift connected with so sorrowful a day as Fulvia's twenty-first birthday.
And Fulvia, at the moment of being asked, did not recall association past, did not realise what Daisy meant, or to what "jewel-case" she alluded. If Daisy had called it a "dressing-case," she might have listened with quicker perception; but "jewel-case" was not one of Fulvia's words. She heard a request vaguely, and granted it, never thinking what the request meant. Her mind was wrapped up in the thought of having to leave Nigel for hours on his only free afternoon.
More than this, she had no vivid recollection of the crumpled half-sheet hidden away in the old dressing-case. The matter of the four postscripts had sunk of late into the background. Since all cessation of intercourse with Mr. Carden-Cox nothing had occurred to call it up. Fulvia had reached a standpoint far removed from the hopes and fears of those days. The lost half-sheet was nothing to her now. She could not have told why it, remained still in her box, except that the all-absorbing events of the last few months had almost driven it out of her mind. Perhaps a dim expectation existed below of some day making a confession, and restoring the paper to its rightful owner. But not yet,—oh, not yet!