"Mr. Brett does not go to see her any more."
"Really? Are you sure of that, Miss Maylands?"
"Marion has noticed it. She spoke to me of it yesterday. I wondered—"
"What?"
"Whether there had been any misunderstanding. I suppose that is what I was going to say." She blushed quickly, as she had turned pale a moment before. "You see," she continued rather hurriedly, "people who have once misunderstood one another may do the same thing again. Say, for instance, that he vaguely hinted at marriage—men have such vague ways of proposing—"
"Have they?"
"Of course—and that Marion did not quite realise what he meant, and turned the conversation, and that Mr. Brett took that for a refusal and went away, and lost his appetite, and all that—would it not account for it?"
"Yes," assented Vanbrugh with a smile. "It might account for it—though Harry Brett is not a school girl of sixteen."
"Meaning that I am, I suppose," retorted Dolly, anxious to get away from the subject which she had not chosen, and to lead Vanbrugh up to what she would have called the chaffing point. But he was not in the humour for that.
"No," he said quietly. "I did not mean that." And he relapsed into silence for a time.