Terry stepped just across the threshold. Having closed the door, she leant against it, still holding the knob in her hand. It was plain that she was making an effort to be valiant. She looked fragile as a peeled white wand; like a flower, shy and dew-wet. Life had not yet commenced to break her. The clinging folds of her wrap emphasized her slenderness, the grace of her lines and the girlish contours of her figure.
Lady Dawn went to her and put her arm about her. "You're afraid. Of what are you afraid? Surely not of Lord Taborley? He's been telling me—— To be loved like that—— There was a time when I would have been proud."
Terry's left hand went up to her breast. Her wild violet eyes looked straight before her, seeking always the face of Tabs. They seemed to call to him. He came slowly to the table where she could see him. It was his chance. Lady Dawn was his advocate. It was the chance for which he had waited.
He was contrasting the two women before him; the one in her dainty, enviable promise and the dumb
hostility of her youth; the other in the gentleness of her experience and the charity of her dearly purchased understanding. Terry, whom he had loved since she was a child, had become inscrutable. But Lady Dawn—— Was it her suffering that made him know her as he knew himself?
"I hadn't meant to intrude on you," he apologized. "I hadn't the least idea you were here. How should I have had? You disappeared without warning; at your father's house your address was refused me. Lady Dawn will bear me out that, at the very moment you entered, I was assuring her that my visit had nothing to do with you. Probably you heard."
"Nothing to do with me!" There was relief in her way of saying it. She visibly relaxed. "Then it isn't because of me at all that you're here?"
The suppressed eagerness of her question was wounding. She wanted to hear him state more positively that she had had nothing to do with his visit. Whatever she had seen before they had become aware of her, had had no power to rouse her jealousy. She could have given him no stronger proof of how absolutely he had ceased to count. He smiled bitterly. "Not because of you at all, Terry. The reason for my being here is strictly private between Lady Dawn and myself. I didn't come to worry you. You may set your mind at rest."
"Then you didn't know or even suspect——"
He laughed unhappily. "What more can I say to convince you? I haven't the least idea what you suppose I could suspect. What business is it of mine