"Why, but—I'll see you again before you go, won't I?" Her voice was piteous.
"Mr. Channing has given me his word," said her mother, "to make no further attempt to communicate with you."
The girl took a long breath. Her chin lifted. "Oh! So you are still going to treat me as a little girl?" she said. "That's a mistake, Mother!"
Without any further effort to detain Channing, she walked to the stairs and up them, her chin still high.
Channing looked back once from the door. Mrs. Kildare, standing in the center of the hall, bowed to him gravely, as a queen might in dismissing an audience. Jemima, on guard at the foot of the staircase, also bowed in stately fashion.
But halfway up, Jacqueline paused and turned; and as his miserable gaze met hers, she distinctly winked at him.
CHAPTER XXXII
More and more, as the days passed, Kate congratulated herself on having taken Jacqueline's affairs in hand before any harm was done. Startled out of her own preoccupation by Jemima's discovery of how matters stood between Jacqueline and the author, she continued to watch the younger girl narrowly; but she saw no signs of secret grief, nor even of wounded pride. The girl had never been more radiant, her cheeks a-glow, her eyes so soft and lustrous that sometimes her mother's grew dim at sight of them. She remembered a time when her own mirror had shown her just such a look of brooding revery.
"Channing has done nothing more than wake her womanhood," thought the mother. "And now, now it is Philip's turn!"