“Hedrick, won’t you please run along? I want to change my dress.”
“What for? There was company for dinner and you didn’t change then.”
Laura’s flushed cheeks flushed deeper, and in her confusion she answered too quickly. “I only have one evening gown. I—of course I can’t wear it every night.”
“Well, then,” he returned triumphantly, “what do you want to put it on now for?”
“Please run along, Hedrick,” she pleaded.
“You didn’t for this Corliss,” he persisted sharply. “You know Dick Lindley couldn’t see anybody but Cora to save his life, and I don’t suppose there’s a girl on earth fool enough to dress up for that Wade Trum——”
“Hedrick!” Laura’s voice rang with a warning which he remembered to have heard upon a few previous occasions when she had easily proved herself physically stronger than he. “Go and tell mother I’m coming,” she said.
He began to whistle “Beulah Land” as he went, but, with the swift closing of the door behind him, abandoned that pathetically optimistic hymn prematurely, after the third bar.
Twenty minutes later, when Laura came out and went downstairs, a fine straight figure in her black evening gown, the Sieur de Marsac—that hard-bitten Huguenot, whose middle-aged shabbiness was but the outward and deceptive seeming of the longest head and the best sword in France—emerged cautiously from the passageway and stood listening until her footsteps were heard descending the front stairs. Nevertheless, the most painstaking search of her room, a search as systematic as it was feverish, failed to reveal where she had hidden the book.
He returned wearily to the porch.