“You heard I had gone to her as her secretary?”
“Something of the kind, I believe.” He leaned forward to refill her cup.
Lily guessed the possibilities of embarrassment which the topic held for him, and raising her eyes to his, she said suddenly: “I left her two months ago.”
Rosedale continued to fumble awkwardly with the tea-pot, and she felt sure that he had heard what had been said of her. But what was there that Rosedale did not hear?
“Wasn’t it a soft berth?” he enquired, with an attempt at lightness.
“Too soft—one might have sunk in too deep.” Lily rested one arm on the edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently than she had ever looked before. An uncontrollable impulse was urging her to put her case to this man, from whose curiosity she had always so fiercely defended herself.
“You know Mrs. Hatch, I think? Well, perhaps you can understand that she might make things too easy for one.”
Rosedale looked faintly puzzled, and she remembered that allusiveness was lost on him.
“It was no place for you, anyhow,” he agreed, so suffused and immersed in the light of her full gaze that he found himself being drawn into strange depths of intimacy. He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly lost under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding intensity that fairly dazzled him.
“I left,” Lily continued, “lest people should say I was helping Mrs. Hatch to marry Freddy Van Osburgh—who is not in the least too good for her—and as they still continue to say it, I see that I might as well have stayed where I was.”