When I entered I found her stretched at full length on a sofa in what appeared to me to be an attitude of almost despairing dejection, and so preoccupied that she did not hear me until I closed the door behind me. Then she sat up quickly and looked at me. She had great mastery over her features, and she evinced neither pleasure nor surprise at sight of me.
“Have you forgotten something and returned for it?” she asked with a sort of conventional politeness.
“Returned?”
“I thought you were going with Boreski.”
“Did you?” My glance said more than my words.
“The Duchess will have been disappointed.”
“Her disappointment is nothing to me.”
“No?” with a lift of the brows, as if in surprise.
“No,” I repeated. “I have been thinking.”
“You would have been better employed in getting back to the city. You would have covered a third of the distance by now.”