“Please—please tell me!” he urged. “I don’t understand. How?”
“That disgusting man! That brute you brought here!”
“Conover? I didn’t bring him. Your father—”
“He is your friend, though,” she insisted, “And he frightened me and he behaved so abominably. And everybody laughed when he went to sleep. I could have died of mortification.”
“But why?” he reasoned. “You weren’t responsible for him. If anyone had cause to feel mortified it was Miss Shevlin who sat beside him. Yet she—”
“Please don’t talk about her!” demanded Letty with a flash of watery dignity, “I have enough to bear without that. If she chose to sit up, looking unconcerned, and talking to him as if nothing had happened, and keeping the brute wide awake and interested all the rest of the evening—it was probably because she knew no better. I suppose her sort of people—”
And here the gods deprived Amzi Nicholas Caine of wisdom.
“She’s a little thoroughbred!” he interposed stoutly, “I never saw anything better done in my life than her treatment of that poor, sheepish, suddenly-awakened chap. It made one ashamed of having wanted to laugh. I—”
“If you are going to take other people’s part against me,” sniffed Letty, “you needn’t trouble to wait here any longer. Goodnight. I am very tired and very miserable.”
Caine forthwith performed prodigies of self abasement that little by little wooed Letty back from tears to temper.