Louise nodded.
"London has never been the same place to me since I first met him in Cumberland," she admitted. "Sometimes I think I am—to use your own words—in love with John. Sometimes I feel it is just a queer, indistinct, but passionate appreciation of the abstract beauty of the life he seems to stand for."
"Is he really so good, I wonder?" Sophy asked pensively.
"I do not know," Louise sighed. "I only know that when I first talked to him, he seemed different from any man I have ever spoken with in my life. I suppose there are few temptations up there, and they keep nearer to the big things. Sometimes I wonder, Sophy, if it was not very wrong of me to draw him away from it all!"
"Rubbish!" Sophy declared. "If he is good, he can prove it and know it here. He will come to know the truth about himself. Besides, it isn't everything to possess the standard virtues. Louise, he will be here in a minute. You want to be left alone with him. What are you going to say when he asks you what you know he will ask you?"
Louise looked down at her.
"Dear," she said, "I wish I could tell you. I do not know. That is the strange, troublesome part of it—I do not know!"
"Will you promise me something?" Sophy begged. "Promise me that if I stay in here quietly until after he has gone, you will come and tell me!"
Louise leaned a little downward as if to look into her friend's face. Sophy suddenly dropped her eyes, and the color rose to the roots of her hair. There was a knock at the door, and the parlor maid entered.
"Mr. Strangewey, madam," she announced.