“Oh, I saw she did, though she never moved an eyelid. I saw it by Charlotte’s blush. The child has the prettiest blush. I saw that her mother wouldn’t let her speak to me.”
Ide put down his hat with an impatient laugh. “Hasn’t Leila cured you of your delusions?”
She looked at him intently. “Then you don’t think Margaret Wynn meant to cut me?”
“I think your ideas are absurd.”
She paused for a perceptible moment without taking this up; then she said, at a tangent: “I’m sailing tomorrow early. I meant to write to you—there’s the letter I’d begun.”
Ide followed her gesture, and then turned his eyes back to her face. “You didn’t mean to see me, then, or even to let me know that you were going till you’d left?”
“I felt it would be easier to explain to you in a letter—”
“What in God’s name is there to explain?” She made no reply, and he pressed on: “It can’t be that you’re worried about Leila, for Charlotte Wynn told me she’d been there last week, and there was a big party arriving when she left: Fresbies and Gileses, and Mrs. Lorin Boulger—all the board of examiners! If Leila has passed that, she’s got her degree.”
Mrs. Lidcote had dropped down into a corner of the sofa where she had sat during their talk of the week before. “I was stupid,” she began abruptly. “I ought to have gone to Ridgefield with Susy. I didn’t see till afterward that I was expected to.”
“You were expected to?”