“Nancy Almar won’t let it pass. She’ll have found the evening dull without you, and she’ll feel she has a right to compensation. And that worm, Wickham; it will be his favorite anecdote for the rest of his life. I was horrible to him last night at dinner.”
“Sorry you were?”
“Not a bit. I’d do it again, but I may as well face the fact that he won’t be eager to conceal his own social triumphs for the sake of my good name. Can’t you hear him, ‘Curious thing happened the other day—at my friends the Usshers’. Know them? A lovely country place—’—”
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “What a bore! Is there anything I could do—”
“Well, there is one thing.”
He looked up quickly. If ever terror flashed in a man’s eyes, she saw it then in his. Her heart sank, but her mind worked none the less well.
“It’s this,” she went on smoothly. “There’s a lodge, a sort of tool-house, only about half a mile down the road. Couldn’t you take a lantern, couldn’t you possibly spend the night there?”
“It isn’t by any chance,” he said, “that you’re afraid of having me here?”
“Oh, no, not you,” she answered. “No, I should feel much safer with you here than there.” (If he went her case was ruined, and she was now actually afraid perhaps he would go.) “I should be terrified in this great place all by myself. Still, I think you ought to go. It’s not so very far. You go down the road a little way and then turn to the right through the woods. I think you’ll find it. The roof used to leak a little, but I dare say you won’t mind that. There isn’t any fireplace, but you could take lots of blankets—”
“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “No one will come to rescue us to-night. I’ll sleep here to-night, and to-morrow as soon as it’s light, I’ll go to this cottage, and when they come, you can tell them any story you please. Will that do?”