“Well, don’t you set store upon Clarissa?”
“Clarissa is exquisite; but her mother didn’t mention her in offering me this recompense.”
Susy lifted her head again. “Whom did she mention?”
“Vanderlyn,” said Lansing.
“Vanderlyn? Nelson?”
“Yes—and some letters... something about letters.... What is it, my dear, that you and I have been hired to hide from Vanderlyn? Because I should like to know,” Nick broke out savagely, “if we’ve been adequately paid.”
Susy was silent: she needed time to reckon up her forces, and study her next move; and her brain was in such a whirl of fear that she could at last only retort: “What is it that Ellie said to you?”
Lansing laughed again. “That’s just what you’d like to find out—isn’t it?—in order to know the line to take in making your explanation.”
The sneer had an effect that he could not have foreseen, and that Susy herself had not expected.
“Oh, don’t—don’t let us speak to each other like that!” she cried; and sinking down by the dressing-table she hid her face in her hands.