Napier took out the last letters. "I expect," he said kindly, "it's been hard enough for you—at times."
"The strain is frightful." She swallowed and began again. "I—Maybe you've noticed.... They will write to me from time to time."
She waited. Napier's face as blank as the new sheet of blotting paper in front of the great presentation ink-stand.
"Well, is it my fault?" she demanded. "I've tried to make them see what an equivocal position it puts me in, how unfair—" her face yearned for sympathy.
Napier went on with his sorting.
"It's too nerve-racking," she said with increasing agitation. "Each one thinks the other has got over that old madness. But the letters they write me...! Frantic!" She came closer still. She laid her hand on Napier's sleeve. "Do you know, sometimes I'm afraid...." She drew back, as a step sounded on the gravel.
"The Pforzheims!" Napier said to himself.
But a very different apparition stood there. The girl in the Mercury cap. Not so blithe as the day before—eager still, but wistful.
"Why, my dear Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg said again, precisely as she had before. "I told you I would come for you!"
"Yes, in the afternoon, you said. But I couldn't wait. Don't look like that, dearest." She had lowered her voice as Miss von Schwarzenberg joined her in the lobby. "I began to be afraid I'd only dreamed that you were so near again."