“That noise—I heard a noise in the house—and Annie, I saw Annie running upstairs—What was it?”
“The drawing-room window had been left open and it banged against the shutter,” replied Mabin. “I went down and shut it, and Annie went down too.”
She was ashamed to have to make this equivocal answer, but she dared not tell the whole truth—yet. She must have more of her friend’s confidence first, she must know more. And again she asked herself whether this man was some old lover of Mrs. Dale’s, who had been shut up on account of insanity, and of whose confinement Mrs. Dale had heard. She thought she would make an attempt to find out.
“What a handsome face this is!” she said, controlling her own nervous agitation as well as she could, and fixing her gaze upon the picture. “I don’t think I ever saw a face I admired so much.”
There was a pause, and Mabin, without looking round, heard her companion draw a deep breath. Presently, however, the latter recovered her self-possession sufficiently to ask, with an assumption of her usual playful tone:
“Not—Rudolph’s?”
Mabin was taken completely off her guard. Her mind filled with the story of her friend, she had for the time forgotten her own.
“Oh, that is a different type of face, quite different,” she replied, relapsing at once into the formal tone of the shy school-girl.
“But not without its good points?” suggested Mrs. Dale, coming behind the girl and putting her little hands on her waist.
Mabin, with an inspiration of astuteness, thought she received a short cut to her friend’s confidence, a confidence which would clear the ground for further discoveries, further enlightenments.