Andrew dropped his hands, and searched her face with his eyes. There was no trace in it of any emotion beyond a slight contempt.
"Do you mean," he asked, "that this is the end?"
"The end?" she repeated. "The end—er—of what?"
With that he left her.
CHAPTER XII.
REACTION.
Noon of the following day found Andrew once more in the Rue Boissière. He had not seen Margery from the moment when he had left her in the arbour. She had come in while the men were playing billiards, and gone directly to her room, pleading a headache, an excuse which was also made to cover her non-appearance in the morning. The two hours immediately following breakfast passed laboriously, the whole party hanging together with that kind of helpless attraction which characterizes the bubbles in a cup of tea. There was a general sense of relief when the big Panhard purred up the driveway, and Andrew, Radwalader, and Kennedy whirled off in it to Paris. Monsieur and Madame Palffy and the Listers were to follow almost immediately by train, and Mrs. Carnby was talking a continuous stream of the most unmitigated gossip.
"If I had stopped to think that in an hour they would all be gone," she told Jeremy, that night, "I would first have screamed the General Thanksgiving at the top of my lungs, and then had the vapours—whatever they may be!"