"Why?" he asked in his turn.
"For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man."
Kent rose.
"I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing."
He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet.
"Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the porch.
XXII
A BORROWED CONSCIENCE
The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the vine-covered trellis.