“Oh, I think so,” she answered, pleasantly. “You might write to me now and then, and I’ll show just a suitable paragraph here and there to an intimate friend.”
A new idea suddenly occurred to him. Had she any motive for desiring his absence? Had some unexpected possibility cropped up? Did she want to get rid of him? Not, he added, that he minded if she did, but it would be rather interesting to know.
“I’m going a little earlier than I expected,” he went on, “because the Lanes are going, and I hate to make that long journey alone.”
She nodded understandingly. “It will be much nicer for you to have them.”
He looked at her coldly. It seemed to him he had never known a more callous nature. And to think that the evening before she had actually shed tears, simply because he took another girl to lunch! It caught his attention, he said to himself, just as a study in human nature.
He did not see her the next day until evening. They were both to dine at Nancy’s—(thus had the proposed dinner with Mrs. Almar deteriorated) and go afterward to the opera. Nancy of course would not have dreamed of crowding three women into her box, so the party consisted of herself and Christine, Riatt, Roland Almar—a pale, eager, little man, trying to placate the world with smiles, and once again Linburne, whose handsome dark head, and curved mouth, half cynical, half sensuous, began to weary Riatt inexpressibly.
After dinner he found that he and Mrs. Almar were to go in her tiny coupé, and the four others in Linburne’s large car.
“And so,” she observed as soon as they started, “the mouse preferred the trap after all?” And he could feel that she was laughing at him in the shadow.
“But feels none the less grateful for the kind intention to rescue him.”
“Oh, I don’t care much for the gratitude of a man in love with another woman.”