"Horace? And what has he said, pray tell?" Her expression was flippant, but a certain inquietude penetrated her heart and accelerated its beating. What had the love-lorn fool said to the child?
"He said that he was not a good man, and that you tolerated him because he ran errands for you. What kind of errands?"
Mrs. Chedsoye did not know whether to laugh or take the child by the shoulders and shake her soundly. "He was laughing when he said that. Errands? One would scarcely call it that."
"Why did you renew the acquaintance with Mr. Jones, when you knew that you never intended paying back that loan?"
Here was a question, Mrs. Chedsoye realized, from the look of the child, that would not bear evasion.
"What makes you think I never intended to repay him?"
Fortune laughed. It did not sound grateful in the mother's ears.
"Mother, this is a crisis; it can not be met by counter-questions nor by flippancy. You know that you did not intend to pay him. What I demand to know is, why you spoke to him again, so affably, why you seemed so eager to enter into his good graces once more. Answer that."
Her mother pondered. For once she was really at a loss. The unexpectedness of this phase caught her off her balance. She saw one thing vividly, regretfully: she had missed a valuable point in the game by not adjusting her play to the growth of the child, who had, with that phenomenal suddenness which still baffles the psychologists, stepped out of girlhood into womanhood, all in a day. What a fool she had been not to have left the child at Mentone!