“My health is good. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as one may choose to look at it, it furnishes me with no excuse for an outing,” she steadily retorted, turning her back on the table.
“Ah, excuse me!” the insidious voice apologized, “your paleness misled me. Surely a night or two’s change might be beneficial.”
She gave him a quick side look, and began to adjust her boa.
To this hint he paid no attention.
“The affair is quite out of the ordinary,” he pursued in the tone of one rehearsing a part. But there he stopped. For some reason, not altogether apparent to the masculine mind, the pin of flashing stones (real stones) which held her hat in place had to be taken out and thrust back again, not once, but twice. It was to watch this performance he had paused. When he was ready to proceed, he took the musing tone of one marshalling facts for another’s enlightenment:
“A woman of unknown instincts—”
“Pshaw!” The end of the pin would strike against the comb holding Violet’s chestnut-coloured locks.
“Living in a house as mysterious as the secret it contains. But—” here he allowed his patience apparently to forsake him, “I will bore you no longer. Go to your teas and balls; I will struggle with my dark affairs alone.”
His hand went to the packet of papers she affected so ostentatiously to despise. He could be as nonchalant as she. But he did not lift them; he let them lie. Yet the young heiress had not made a movement or even turned the slightest glance his way.
“A woman difficult to understand! A mysterious house—possibly a mysterious crime!”