Claire paused in the doorway and looked sullenly, yet hardly suspiciously, at them. She had never worn a mask for Damier, yet he saw in her flushed and somber face something new to him, saw that she lacked some quality—was it confidence, indifference, placidity?—that he had always found in her. He guessed in a moment that her interview with Monsieur Daunay had not been a propitious one.
“I did not expect to see you so soon again, and under such suddenly changed circumstances,” she said to him. “What are you talking about? Me?” She took off her hat,—the day was sultry,—pushed up her thick hair, and dropped her length of ruffled, clinging white into a chair. “So; I have seen Monsieur Daunay. He lost no time, it seems. He asked my hand of you first, I hear, Mamma, in proper form—très convenablement.”
“Yes,” Madame Vicaud assented with composure.
“It seems that you discouraged him.”
“I could not encourage him from what you had told me, but from what he told me it seems that you did not discourage him,” the mother answered.
“I have never been in a position to discourage any useful possibility,” said Claire.
Madame Vicaud, in silence, and with something of a lion-tamer’s calm intentness of eye, looked at her daughter; and Claire, after meeting the look with one frankly hostile, turned her eyes on Damier.
“And it seems that you, last night, did not discourage Monsieur Daunay’s hopes; he spoke of you with gratitude. What have you to say to it all now?”
“I have nothing to say to it; it has always been your affair—yours and his.”