“And you left Mr. Carleton at ten o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what he did after that?”
“I do not!” the answer rang out clearly, as if Miss Burt were glad to be well past the danger point of the dialogue. But it came back at her with the next question.
“What was the tenor of your conversation with Mr. Carleton in the rose garden?”
At this Dorothy Burt’s calm gave way. She trembled, her red lower lip quivered, and her eye-lids fluttered, almost as if she were about to faint.
But, by a quick gesture, she straightened herself up, and, looking her interlocutor in the eyes said:
“I trust I am not obliged to answer that very personal question.”
Like a flash it came to Fessenden that her perturbation had been merely a clever piece of acting. She had trembled and seemed greatly distressed in order that Mr. Benson’s sympathy might be so aroused that he would not press the question.
And indeed it required a hardened heart to insist on an answer from the lovely, agitated girl.