“Stay where you are then, my dear,” replied her hostess; “and you will still have the advantage of listening to my warblings. Will you stay, too?” And she looked directly at Ralph Webster.
“I will go with you, if I may?” he answered.
She smiled her saucy smile.
“Come then,” she said, and the two passed together through the draped archway that divided the two rooms.
“How sentimental that young idiot looks,” she remarked as she opened the piano.
Webster smiled, and slightly shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s his calf-love, I suppose,” he said.
“From which he will speedily awake, if he does what Linda Falconer means him to do. But what matter! Yet, poor boy, I half pity him with his round, honest brown eyes fixed on her face.”
“She is a beautiful woman.”
“Yes, she is,” answered Kathleen, sharply, “with a heart of stone. There is no thought of human affection in her; neither love nor hate. She means to marry Dereham because he is Dereham, and I dare say she will succeed. She holds the whip hand, you see, because she gives him nothing.”