"I wasn't wondering at all," said the other lady, who had now also risen and shaken hands with the visitor. "I knew you would come. So did Virginia, really. We were talking about you. I will now retire to another apartment and leave you alone."
"Indeed you'll do no such thing," said Virginia Dubec, taking her by the shoulders and pushing her back into her chair. "We will have the lights and tea—although it is early—and a talk of three together. We're all friends, and you're not going to sit alone."
"Of course not," said Dick. "A nice sort of state you'd work yourself up into against me! I know you, Miss Dexter."
She took her seat again and unrolled her work. She was short and rather plain, with sandy-coloured hair and square-tipped fingers. She had not smiled since Dick had entered the room.
"Oh, I don't deny that I'm jealous," she said. "I've had her to myself for three years, and you have come and stolen her away from me. But it's a harmless sort of jealousy. It doesn't make me object to you. It only makes me wonder sometimes."
"What do you wonder?" asked Dick, standing up before the fire and looking down at her with a glance that immediately transferred itself to her companion, on whom his eyes rested with an expression that had a hint of hunger in it.
Virginia answered for her. "She wonders what there is in a man for a woman to cling to—and especially after my experience. She thinks a woman's friendship ought to be enough. She wants no other. We talk over these things together, but we don't quarrel. She knows that I shall always love her, don't you, Toby?"
"Perhaps I do, perhaps I don't," said Miss Dexter. "But we needn't discuss these matters before Captain Dick. I'll ring for the lights and the tea."
Dick breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. He was not at home in the discussions of abstract questions. "How do you find yourself here, Virginia?" he asked, looking round him. "You have made this room very jolly, anyhow."
"That's what Mr. Marsh said, in his own particular way," she said, with a smile. "He said, 'If I'd known a woman could do this sort of thing to a house, I'd have married a wife years ago.'"