A deep flush rose to his forehead. “Oh, I know—I know that—” he declared hastily; and added, with a factitious animation: “But thank you for telling me.”
“There’s nothing, is there,” she continued, “to make our meeting in this way in the least embarrassing or painful to either of us, when both have found....” She broke off, and held her hand out to him. “I’ve heard about you and Coral,” she ended.
He just touched her hand with cold fingers, and let it drop. “Thank you,” he said for the third time.
“You won’t sit down?”
He sat down.
“Don’t you think,” she continued, “that the new way of... of meeting as friends... and talking things over without ill-will... is much pleasanter and more sensible, after all?”
He smiled. “It’s immensely kind of you to feel that.”
“Oh, I do feel it!” She stopped short, and wondered what on earth she had meant to say next, and why she had so abruptly lost the thread of her discourse.
In the pause she heard him cough slightly and clear his throat. “Let me say, then,” he began, “that I’m glad too—immensely glad that your own future is so satisfactorily settled.”
She lifted her glance again to his walled face, in which not a muscle stirred.