He thanked her gravely, and went obediently when his mother called to him from the steps. But on the Woodlawn veranda he excused himself to smoke a cigar in the open; and when the door closed behind the two in-going, he swiftly recrossed the lawns to pay the penalty.
The front door of the manor-house was shut and the broad, pillared portico was untenanted. He sat down in one of the rustic chairs and searched absently in his pockets for a cigar. Before he could find it the door opened and closed and Ardea stood before him. She had thrown a wrap over her shoulders, and the light from the music-room windows illuminated her. There was cool scorn in the slate-blue eyes, but in Tom's thought she had never appeared more unutterably beautiful and desirable—and unattainable.
"I have come," she said, in a tone that cut him to the heart for its very indifference. "What have you to say for yourself?"
He rose quickly and offered her the chair; and when she would not take it, he put his back to the wall and stood with her.
"I'm afraid I haven't left myself much to say," he began penitently. "I was born foolish, and it seems that I haven't outgrown it. But, really, if you could know—"
"Unhappily, I do know," she interrupted. "If I did not, I might listen to you with better patience."
"It did look pretty bad," he confessed. "And that's what I wanted to say; it looked a great deal worse than it was, you know."
"I don't know," she retorted.
"You are tangling me," he said, gaining something in self-possession under the flick of the whip. "First you say you know, and then you say you don't know. Which is which?"
"If you are flippant I shall go in," she threatened. "There are things that not even the most loyal friendship can condone."