The carriage rolled smoothly down the avenue from the great house, over which she might so easily have reigned, and turned into the road. A few minutes later the motor-car flashed by. Afterwards there was solitude, for it was already past midnight. Gilbert Deyes looked thoughtfully out at the carriage from his place in the car. He had begged—very hard for him—for that empty seat.
“Of what is it a sign,” he asked, “when a woman seeks solitude?”
Lady Peggy shrugged her shoulders.
“Wilhelmina is tired of us all, I suppose,” she remarked. “She gets like that sometimes.”
“Then of what is it a sign,” he persisted, “when a woman tires of people—like us?”
Lady Peggy yawned.
“In a woman of more primitive instincts,” she said, “it would mean an affair. But Wilhelmina has outgrown all that. She is the only woman of our acquaintance of whom one would dare to say it, but I honestly believe that to Wilhelmina men are like puppets. Was she born, I wonder, with ice in her veins?”
“One wonders,” Deyes remarked softly. “A woman like that is always something of a mystery. By the bye, wasn’t there a whisper of something the year she lived in Florence?”
“People have talked of her, of course,” Lady Peggy answered. “In Florence, a woman without a lover is like a child without toys. To be virtuous there is the one offence which Society does not pardon.”
“I believe,” Deyes said, “that a lover would bore Wilhelmina terribly.”