"I am going away. I can't stay." Though Caroline spoke clearly and firmly, her lips were trembling, and the marks of tears were still visible under her indignant eyes, which looked large and brilliant, like the eyes of a startled child.
"You are going away? What on earth is the reason? Has anything happened?" Then lowering her voice, she murmured cautiously, "Come into my room a minute. Letty is playing and won't miss you." Putting her lean arm about Caroline's shoulders, she led her gently down the hall and to her room in the west wing. Not until she had forced her into an easy chair by the radiator, and turned back to close the door carefully, did she say in an urgent tone, "Now, my dear, you needn't be afraid to tell me. I am very fond of you—I feel almost as if you were my own child—and I want to help you if you will let me."
"There isn't anything except—except there has been a misunderstanding——" Caroline looked up miserably from the big chair, with her lips working pathetically. All the spirit had gone out of her. "Mr. Blackburn seems to have got the idea that I care for Roane Fitzhugh—that I even went out to meet him."
Mrs. Timberlake, whose philosophy was constructed of the bare bones of experience, stared out of the window with an expression that made her appear less a woman than a cynical point of view. Her profile grew sharper and flatter until it gave the effect of being pasted on the glimmering pane.
"Well, I reckon David didn't make that up in his own mind," she observed with a caustic emphasis.
"I met him—I mean Roane Fitzhugh to-day. Of course it was by accident, but he had been drinking and behaved outrageously, and then Mr. Blackburn found us together," pursued Caroline slowly, "and—and he said things that made me see what he thought. He told me that he believed I liked that dreadful man—that I came out by appointment——"
"But don't you like him, my dear?" The housekeeper had turned from the sunset and taken up her knitting.
"Of course I don't. Why in the world—how in the world——"
"And David told you that he thought so?" The old lady looked up sharply.
"He said he understood that I liked him—Roane Fitzhugh. I didn't know what he meant. He was obliged to explain." After all, the tangle appeared to be without beginning and without end. She realized that she was hopelessly caught in the mesh of it.