"I'll not go to Long Island—at present. I'll stay in New York. But I won't be your guest."
"You're cruel, Jack! You're selfish!" Juliet cried, as she had often unjustly cried before.
"You know better," he said. "It is the outsider who sees the game. I ought to see it—if I'm to help. And I wouldn't be an outsider if I were your guest. I've taken rooms at the Hotel Tarascon, only one street away from your house and Pat's."
Juliet was silent for a moment. She had a hideous fear that, in her anger, she had flung Her house, Her money, Her everything, at Claremanagh's stone pale face.
CHAPTER VIII
JULIET BREAKS THE SEALS
At six forty-two the Duchess of Claremanagh descended from a plebeian taxicab in front of her pretentious home. She had sent away her own car, before going to the Lorne, and though there was no wrong in her secret, she was weighed down by a sense of guilt as she went to her room. This annoyed her, because the one guilty person in the house was Pat!
She had heard, toward the end of her conversation with Jack, that the pearls had come while he was with the Duke; but the girl was too wretched to care. How did she know that the story about Monsieur Mayen was not a "fake"? It was quite possible that Pavoya had had the pearls for months, and had only now given them up, under cover of Mayen's name, and his messenger on the Britannia. Juliet felt as Emmy West had expected her to feel: She hated the pearls! Whatever the truth was, she could take no pleasure in wearing them. All the same, she would wear them, to show curiosity-mongers that they were not in Lyda Pavoya's hands. She would wear them this very night.
She and Claremanagh were engaged to dine at the Van Estens', and he had insisted in the morning that he would be well enough to go. Now, for all she could tell, he might have changed his mind, and 'phoned that his cold would keep him at home. That excuse should not affect her, however. If he did not bring or send the pearls to her room, Simone should take him a note. In this, Juliet would say, not that Jack had told her, but that she "supposed the messenger had arrived," and she would ask for the pearls to wear at Nancy's dinner party—ask for them not as a favour, but because of the right she had, as Duchess of Claremanagh.
"Madame is very late!" were Simone's first words as Juliet flung open her bedroom door. "I began to be anxious."