“I know I am late and I am sorry,” Leilah withdrawing her gloves, replied. “But how am I a liar?”
“Come to luncheon and you will precious soon find out. I had some eggs for you, eggs à l’Aurore Boréale. I had a sweetbread. I had—I have forgotten what else. Now I have nothing. Everything is spoiled.”
Violet Silverstairs was perhaps imaginative. There were eggs, very good eggs too, though whether prepared in the Aurora Borealis fashion is perhaps beside the issue. Moreover there was a sweetbread, one that had been germinated on salt meadows and which was not spoiled in the least. In addition there were the other things which she had forgotten and all of them appetising in the extreme. It was an excellent luncheon, perfectly served in a beautiful room. But it was a luncheon for Sybarites, not for the suffering. After the first morsel Leilah was unable to eat.
“Where is Silverstairs?” she asked when that morsel had been consumed.
“With your ex.”
Leilah put down her fork. “With Gulian?”
Violet laughed. “Have you more than one? But it was just through him that your lie cropped out. Last night he swore by bell, book and candle that you had never told him why you cut and ran.”
It was at this juncture that Leilah found herself unable to eat. Instantly her mind shot back. She was at Coronado again, in the sunshine and frippery of her sitting room. She could see Verplank as he left it, see the letters that had been brought, see herself as she opened one of them, that one which with its enclosures she had redirected and left for him. The possibility never before conjectured, that he had not received it girdled her with a zone of ice. For a moment she looked fixedly at one of the windows through which the pale daylight fell. In the beautiful room, companioned by her nearest friend, she felt that sense of utter loneliness which in the great crises of life is experienced by all. Yet was it true?
“Violet!” she cried. “You are jesting.”