“I do think so,” said the girl. “She’s LIKE it, at least.”
“But with whom?”
She laughed gaily. “I’m afraid she’s my rival!”
“Not with—” I began.
“Yes, with your beautiful and mad young friend.”
“But—oh, it’s preposterous!” I cried, profoundly disturbed. “She couldn’t be! If you knew a great deal about her—”
“I may know more than you think. My simplicity of appearance is deceptive,” she mocked, beginning to set her sketch-box in order. “You don’t realise that Mrs. Harman and I are quite HURLED upon each other at Quesnay, being two ravishingly intelligent women entirely surrounded by large bodies of elementals. She has told me a great deal of herself since that first evening, and I know—well, I know why she did not come back from Dives this afternoon, for instance.”
“WHY?” I fairly shouted.
She slid her sketch into a groove in the box, which she closed, and rose to her feet before answering. Then she set her hat a little straighter with a touch, looking so fixedly and with such grave interest over my shoulder that I turned to follow her glance and encountered our reflections in a window of the inn. Her own shed a light upon THAT mystery, at all events.
“I might tell you some day,” she said indifferently, “if I gained enough confidence in you through association in daily pursuits.”