“What is it?”
“Something important.”
“You told us that,” her mother returned. “What is it?”
Cornelia’s voice expressed the strained tolerance of a person who has already reported, over and over, all the known facts in a case. “Mamma, I explained that it’s something important. Would you mind letting me go?”
“No! Do!” her mother replied crisply, and, when Cornelia had disappeared, turned again to her oldest daughter, and with widespread hands made the gesture of one displaying strange stuff for inspection.
“You see? That’s what she’s like all the time.”
“What do you suppose it is she says is so important?”
Mrs. Cromwell laughed ruefully. “That’s all you’d ever find out about it from her. If I ask her again at lunch what it was, she’ll do just what she did then. Her expression will show that she finds me a very trying person, and she’ll either say, ‘Nothing,’ or else, ‘It was something I wanted to attend to.’ And if we should follow her up to her room now, we shouldn’t learn any more about it. She’d probably be just pottering at her dressing-table or looking out of the window. That’s all we’d find her doing.”
In this surmise Mrs. Cromwell was correct;—if she and Mildred had ascended to Cornelia’s room, they would have found her either rearranging the silver and porcelain trifles on her dressing-table, or else standing at the window near her desk and looking down pensively upon the suburban boulevard below. That is to say, by the time they opened the door she would have been doing one of those two things: Cornelia was quick of hearing.
What they would have found her doing, if they could have entered her room without any forewarning sound of footsteps, however, was another matter. While her mother and sister continued to wonder about her downstairs, Cornelia went to her small desk of dull mahogany and seated herself before it, but, having done that, did nothing else for a minute or two;—instead, she sat listening, a precaution due to the possibility that her mother might indeed prove so curious as to follow up recent inquiries in person.