She was evidently finding it hard to continue. She twisted the fringe of the counterpane in her slender, white fingers, and she did not look at him.
"It all turned out as you said it would," she admitted at last. "I—I simply couldn't stand Harold Phipps."
Quin's heart performed an athletic feat. It leaped into his throat and remained there.
"But you'll be joining some other company, I suppose?" He tried to make his voice formal and detached.
"That depends," she said; and she looked at him again in that queer, tremulous, mysterious way that he did not in the least understand.
Her small hands were fluttering so close to his that he could have captured them both in one big palm; but he heroically refrained. He kept saying over and over to himself that it was just Miss Nell's way of being good to a fellow, and that, whatever happened, he must not make her unhappy and sorry—he must not lose his head.
"Quin,"—her voice dropped so low he could scarcely hear it,—"have you ever forgiven me for the way I behaved in New York?"
"Sure!"
He was trembling now, and he wondered how much longer he could hold out.
"Do you—do you—still feel about me the way you—you did—that night on the bus?" she whispered.