“She left me out to-night,” said Peter. “She had that immense box for the play and never asked me to it.”
Nellie folded her wings and dropped.
“But you got there all right,” she said. “She saw you, too, sitting with Mrs. Wardour, who hasn’t asked her to the party for the Russian ballet. Blood, my dear; there’ll be blood over that. Do you know, I think Silvia is one of the most attractive girls I have ever seen.”
As she spoke there came from outside the tingle of the front door bell. Nellie got up with a finger on her lip.
“Who on earth can that be?” she whispered.
“It may be anybody,” said Peter, very prudently. “You can’t tell till you go and see. Perhaps it’s Philip; we may have got hold of each other’s hats by mistake, and he’s come here——”
Nellie suppressed a laugh.
“Probably mother,” she said. “She forgets her latchkey when she thinks she’ll be late home. I shan’t say you’re here, or she’d come in and spoil our talk.”
“Oh, what a tangled——” began Peter.
Nellie took the additional precaution of turning out the lights in the room where they were sitting and leaving the door open. Close outside was the entrance door from the stairs into the flat, and Peter, sitting in the window-seat, heard with an amusement that dimpled his cheeks Nellie’s unhesitating account of herself. It appeared that she had just come in and was just going to bed; she had already put out the lights in the sitting-room. There followed a triumphant announcement of her mother’s winnings, an affectionate good night, and the closing of a door down the passage. Sitting there in the dark Peter drew the conclusion that Nellie put a high premium on the pursuit of the conversation in which, as he infallibly conjectured, she had just got down to the bone. She would scarcely, for the æsthetic delight in tortuosity, have concealed the fact that he had dropped in, as he had done a hundred times before, for a few minutes’ chat on his way home. She wanted to talk about Silvia. For his part he was perfectly ready to talk about Silvia.