“Well, Elise, don’t interrupt us again to-night with telephone messages or anything else,” Farwell commanded. And then to Cynthia and Lewis, “Telephones are the devil! Damned intrusions on decent privacy! Clare agrees with me. We’re thinking of having ’em taken out. As it is, it’s a private number, of course, but Petra has given it to several of her friends. Only natural, I suppose. But I detest it.”
Petra was back almost before her father was done grumbling. She came only to the door, however, and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Father, but I’ve got a headache. Elise is bringing the table. I couldn’t possibly play. Tell Clare when they come in, will you? I am going to bed.”
It would have been absurdly impossible to accept illness as an explanation of Petra’s leaving her own birthday party so suddenly, if her story were not so borne out by her look. She had lost all the unusual high color of the earlier part of the evening and become extraordinarily white and peaked. Cynthia saw it as plainly as her doctor brother. She cried, “Petra, dear child! You must let me come with you. You do look really ill. And at your own party! It’s a shame!”
“No, don’t come, please. I’ll be perfectly all right. I just want to be alone. Will you tell Clare, please, not to come in, afterwards, to-night? I may be asleep and I’d rather she didn’t. Good night, Doctor Pryne. Good night, Mrs. Allen, and Father. I’m so sorry....”
When Clare and Dick drifted in a few minutes later, it was Cynthia who did Petra’s explaining. But by then Harry had waked to the fact that nobody was taking advantage of his jazz and had come to the drawing-room.
“That’s funny!” he said, breaking into his wife’s account of Petra’s sudden desertion. “Petra didn’t go to bed, you know. She went out of the door. I saw her. That’s why I stopped playing. I thought you and Petra were dancing, Dick. Then I looked up and saw Petra going alone out the front door in a tearing hurry.”
“Did she have a wrap on?” Cynthia asked, concerned.
“No. Just her pretty party frock.”
“She’s back now then,” Clare said, “and in her bed. It’s really cold.” But she looked at Lewis, her eyes distraught. Had the woman any compunction for what she had done? If not, it was superb acting. She was a Duse, Lewis thought, but with her genius devoted to personal, secret dramas.
“Anyway, I’d better go up and see how she is,” Clare murmured. “She doesn’t have headaches like this, you know. Not suddenly. She must have been—disturbed about something. Put out. I’ll go up. I think she’ll come back.”