She rested her hand, oblivious of the people about them, for a moment on his arm.
“Oh! I’m glad,” she said... “I’m glad. That’s finished with. I have always felt those letters would cost another life.”
“God forbid!” he muttered, and added reassuringly: “They’re past doing harm now... They’re destroyed. I burnt them myself—to-day.”
She drew a long breath that was, he felt, a sigh of genuine relief. He looked at her curiously. He had never understood her interest in the letters, but he knew she was very greatly interested; and her relief in the knowledge of their destruction conclusively proved that in this matter at least she had no sympathy with Karl Van Bleit. He sometimes wondered whether he had not been mistaken in his opinion as to her feeling for Van Bleit.
“They are making a move,” he said to her. And then, as Theodore Smythe spoke to him in passing, he turned to her and offered her his arm. “I have the pleasure of taking you in,” he added.
And neither of them remembered, then or later, that his question as to travelling Home with her remained unanswered.
Colonel Grey left the Smythes’ early as he had arranged to do, and Mrs Lawless, who was going on elsewhere, took her departure at the same time.
“I am crowding all the dissipation possible into my last week,” she explained, but withheld the reason for this feverish activity.
He gave her his arm and led her out to the waiting motor. As he came out of the gate Tom Hayhurst, who had been dawdling about for him for the past half-hour, stepped quickly forward; then seeing who was with him stopped abruptly, and drew back. But Mrs Lawless had seen and recognised him.
“Mr Hayhurst!” she exclaimed, in a voice of surprise, and held out her hand.