In the end she chose the course that seemed to combine the least evil with the most good. She would go to the Eyrie, and the world and her father and mother would think she was absenting herself from her husband to attend to the bringing up of her boy. She would see even less of Scarborough than she saw when she was last at Saint X.
That afternoon she wrote to Dumont:
Since we had our talk I have found out about Leonora. It is impossible for me to stay here. I shall go West to-morrow. But I shall not go to my father's; because of your circular I shall go to the Eyrie, instead—at least for the present.
PAULINE DUMONT.
Two weeks after she was again settled at the Eyrie, Langdon appeared in Saint X, alleging business at the National Woolens' factories there. He accepted her invitation to stay with her, and devoted himself to Gladys, who took up her flirtation with him precisely where she had dropped it when they bade each the other a mock-mournful good-by five months before. They were so realistic that Pauline came to the satisfying conclusion that her sister-in-law was either in earnest with Langdon or not in earnest with anybody. If she had not been avoiding Scarborough, she would probably have seen Gladys' real game—to use Langdon as a stalking horse for him.
"No doubt Scarborough, like all men, imagines he's above jealousy," Gladys had said to herself, casting her keen eyes over the situation. "But there never was a man who didn't race better with a pace-maker than on an empty track."
Toward the end of Langdon's first week Pauline's suspicions as to one of the objects of his winter trip West were confirmed by his saying quite casually: "Dumont's dropped Fanshaw, and Leonora's talking of the stage. In fact, she's gone abroad to study."
When he was leaving, after nearly three weeks, he asked her when she was coming back East.
"Never—I hope," she said, her fingers playing with the close-cropped curls of her boy standing beside her.
"I fancied so—I fancied so," replied Langdon, his eyes showing that he understood her and that he knew she understood for whom he had asked.
"You are going to stay on—at the Eyrie?"