“Bob took me home,” she answered quickly.
“Well, as long as you’re safe that’s all I care about. I just stopped in,” he ended, moving slowly down the steps, but at the foot he could not resist adding:
“I suppose you saw that grandstand play of your cousin’s?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you think of it?”
He looked at her insisting on an answer, and after a moment got it:
“I thought, James, that you would never have done anything so foolish.”
“I most certainly would not,” he returned; and he had walked as far as the corner before it struck him that as an answer it was not entirely satisfactory, but it seemed too late to go back.
Later in the morning she had a visit from Louisa Overton, who drove over from her own house, in her umbrella-topped phaeton with the bay cobs which her father had so carefully selected for her. She came, as she explained, to welcome her dear Nellie, but her dear Nellie noted with uneasiness the unusual promptitude of the visit. There could not, of course, be the smallest chance of seeing Bob at that hour, but Nellie’s heart sank as she observed how often her cousin’s name was introduced into the conversation. It seemed to grow up spontaneously like a weed, and yet Nellie was sufficiently experienced in the peculiarities of her own sex to know it was a danger-signal. She wondered if the time had come for delivering the warning against her cousin which Emmons had advocated. She felt strangely adverse to delivering it.
She tried a new mode of attack as the girl rose to go, after a final comment on Vickers’s conduct at the fire.