“You surely mean, what Lady Mickleham—?”
“No, I don’t,” said Mrs. Hilary, with extraordinary decision. “Anything might have happened to that poor child!”
“Oh, there were not many of the aristocracy present,” said I soothingly.
“But it’s not that so much as the thing itself. She’s the most disgraceful flirt in London.”
“How do you know she was flirting?” I inquired with a smile.
“How do I know?” echoed Mrs. Hilary.
“It is a very hasty conclusion,” I persisted. “Sometimes I stay talking with you for an hour or more. Are you, therefore, flirting with me?”
“With you!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilary, with a little laugh.
“Absurd as the supposition is,” I remarked, “it yet serves to point the argument. Lady Mickleham might have been talking with a friend, just in the quiet rational way in which we are talking now.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” said Mrs. Hilary; and—well, I do not like to say that she sniffed—it would convey too strong an idea, but she did make an odd little sound something like a much etherealized sniff.