“Yes,” said Aurora in a voice that sounded pale, even as 285her face looked pale. “I have understood, and I won’t come again. Just one thing, Gerald. Put your arms under the bed clothes and keep them there.”
“Whether he’s better or worse I truly couldn’t tell you,” Aurora said in answer to Estelle’s first question. After a moment she added, “I can’t make him out.”
Estelle saw that she was deeply troubled, and, herself troubled at the sight, did not press her for explanations.
During the drive home Aurora made only one other remark. It was delivered with a certain emphasis.
“One thing I know: I sha’n’t go there again in a hurry!”
Her lilacs, after wondering a moment what to do with them, she had quietly deposited outside Gerald’s entrance-door.
It was unimaginable, of course, that the childhood’s friend should so disregard the rules of the game as to leave her old playmate’s curiosity long unsatisfied. Estelle accordingly learned before evening that Gerald had been guilty of an attack of nerves, in the course of which he had said something which Aurora did not like. What this was Aurora would not tell, saying it seemed unfair to repeat things Gerald had spoken while he was not himself and which he perhaps did not mean. From which Estelle judged that Aurora had already softened since she returned to the carriage looking as grim as she was grieved.
That Aurora had something on her mind no observant person could fail to see, and Estelle was not unprepared to hear her say as she did on the third morning at breakfast, after fidgeting a moment with a pinch of bread: