Flavia shrank, commencing to tremble before a looming premonition of something still worse to be endured.
"What of Corrie? Isabel, what?"
"You will hear soon enough," she assured bitterly. "I've said all I can. No—don't ask me, don't follow me. They will tell you downstairs. I'm going."
Downstairs, meant the servants. Flavia Rose was, above all things, maiden-proud; as Gerard's fiancée, as Gerard's wife, no cost of pain or humiliation would have kept her from him. But she was neither. She had only her own interpretation of his mirthful glances and graceful speech, only a few yellow roses to hint that he did not regard her as the most casual of friends. Suppose she had been mistaken, suppose he had meant only courtesy to a hostess whose youth exacted gallantry?
Isabel had gone. Flavia turned her face to a diminutive mirror lying among the trifles on her desk. Could she go down to the curious servants so—pale, quivering and emotion-spent? Even as she looked into her own reflected eyes, the tears at last overflowed.
It was half an hour later before Flavia, quiet, dignified and only betrayed by her absolute pallor, trusted herself to descend the stairs.
The Rose house was too near the race course, too intimately concerned in the drama, for the information she sought not to be already rife gossip there. When Mr. Rose came home, near noon, he had little left to tell his daughter except Gerard's condition and his defense of Corrie.
"Then Corrie did not hurt him," she grasped the exquisite relief.
Mr. Rose shook his head, reluctantly discouraged and discouraging. He had not gone to the city during those intervening hours; he never, then or afterward, spoke of where he had been or what he had felt.