For the first time in her recollection she was glad to see Gerald Carron, as he came up the stairs, and approached them slowly.
"Does mother want me?" she asked, rising.
"No. I—just wondered what you were doing."
"I brought Lady Brigit here because I wanted to talk to her," explained Joyselle, mildly. Carron laughed.
"So do I want to talk to her!"
Brigit gave a nervous laugh. "Let's all go downstairs and talk there. My conversation isn't usually so appreciated."
The two men followed her in silence, and to her immense relief were both promptly accosted by someone of the party, and she could escape to her window seat.
What would have happened if Carron had not come, she asked herself with a shudder. Would her strength have come back, and would she have been able to tell Joyselle that he must make no plans for her wedding?
Until she had known his father, Théo had never seemed to her to lack personality; he was young, but his very boyishness was individual. Yet now with Joyselle clamouring for her to fix her wedding-day, Théo seemed to fade into insignificance, and her task to become that of breaking the news of her intended rupture with the son, to the father.
And as she sat there in the background watching the members of the little party as they smoked and chatted to each other, she gave up and resolved on flight. "If I told Théo he would rush to his father," she thought, "and then Joyselle would come to me. And we'd quarrel, and then anything might happen." His utter unconsciousness was at once a safeguard and a menace.