So they stayed at home, but at nine o'clock Grace said she wanted air, and would go for a little walk.
"Shall I come with you?" Theresa asked lazily, and was so much startled by Grace's quick and emphatic, "Oh no, thank you!" that she almost felt it in her conscience to follow her; but she sat still, frowning, and put a direct question when Grace, returned, unusually silent, and stood to warm her hands before the fire.
"Have you been out with a man?"
"Theresa, you're horrid. No, I have not. You talk to me as though I were a servant girl."
Theresa smiled. "I wish you were as unsusceptible as Bessie. She gets all her romance out of novelettes, bless her!"
Grace drew a troubled breath. "I've been doing something like that myself to-night." She stared into the fire, and spoke with a slight blurring of her words. "I feel as if I want to tell you. I've just been—imagining."
"Don't you often do it?"
"Why, no! I'm generally much too busy with the present, but lately—oh, well, I expect I'm silly."
"No. Go on."
"I'm nearly twenty-four."