Harry had the air of one about to scold, and certainly Flora thought if anybody was carrying matters with a high hand, it wasn't herself; but she didn't follow his direction. She continued to stand, while he, sitting on the table's edge, drumming the top of his hat, gloomily regarded her.
"Well?" she persisted, troubled by this look of his, and this silence.
"Look here," he began, "I have to be away a couple of days and I wish you'd do me a favor."
Flora's thought flew to the ring. Was he going to ask for it back, to have it reset, as he had promised on the threshold of the goldsmith's shop? Here might be the chance she had hoped for of getting rid of it. She grasped at it before she had time to waver.
"I wonder if it's the very favor I was going to ask of you."
But he didn't take it up. He seemed hardly to hear her, as if his mind was too much absorbed with quite another question—a question that the next moment came out flat. "What was that Kerr doing here yesterday?"
She was taken aback, so far had her apprehension of Harry's jealousy slipped into the background in the last twenty-four hours. But her consciousness that Harry was not behaving well, even for a jealous man, made her take it up all the more lightly.
"Why, he was calling, chatting, taking tea—what anybody else would do from four to six. What in the world gave you the idea that he was doing anything extraordinary?"
"Well," he said, "you shouldn't do the sort of thing that makes you talked about."
"'That makes me talked about'?" It made her pause in front of him.