"He must have enjoyed the place immensely. I'm nowhere so strongly reminded of rural England, saving the architecture, of course. Ewing painted, doubtless?"
"Oh, no, he did nothing. He played with my sister, chiefly. Virginia took him about. They were inseparable. He had heart for nothing but her—no work, nothing else." She had deliberately lengthened the speech, wishing him not to see that she watched for an opening. Teevan seemed to feel a leading. He searched her face as he asked:
"They liked each other immensely, eh?"
"Oh, yes, I couldn't tell you——"
He felt the weariness of her tone, almost a faintness. The color burned darkly high on her cheeks, her eyes showed an exotic and painful splendor. He suddenly saw that she must have sustained some blow; that her luster was a fevered glitter sad and terrible, and that she was nerving herself to some ordeal. He sank back in his seat, all acuteness. Had she betrayed herself in the beginning, struck open the secret for him by her first words? A jealous woman, then—a flouted woman come to turn on the man? It was no conclusion to leap at; rather a piquant suspicion to verify.
He set his glass down and picked up a slender-bladed dagger from the desk before him, absently bending the steel. He knew they were both veiled for the moment. His eyes challenged her to open speech of Ewing as he held the dagger up to her and said lazily, "A beauty, that—undoubted Toledo work. Picked it up in a shop at Newport yesterday. They knew how to temper steel in those days. See its edge—" He tore a bit of paper from a pad and slashed it into strips, his eyes rising to hers at each cut, interrogatory, through the complacence of a man exhibiting a fine property.
"Randall, you've been friendly with him, and yet you know who he is; you've known it a long time. And you—you can't like him."
He still toyed with his plaything, prickling its needle-like point into the pad of paper under his hand. Then he turned on her with a sudden, insinuating droop of the eyelids.
"Very well—and you've been friendly with him, say until two weeks ago. And you're no longer so. I name no reason. But you detest him now. Am I wrong? Can I still read a woman?" He leaned toward her, peering nearer with each query. He meant them to be like thrusts of the dagger which he now threw on the desk. Her eyes fell in unfeigned confusion under his look, her mind running many ways to come on the meaning beneath this preposterous guess. She looked up to him, seeking a hint, but his eyes were inscrutable, his mouth set in a sagacious smile, intimating, accusing. She looked down again, suddenly feeling it wise to let him think as he did—whatever absurd thing it might be. She sighed deeply, relaxed in her chair and met his eyes again. Teevan beheld a woman defenseless to his insight; one too proud to confess in words, but too weak, too vindictive, perhaps, to attempt denial.
"I see, my girl—don't trouble to speak." He replenished his glass from the decanter. He was delighted with his penetration; pleased, also, to believe that here was an ally, if one should be needed. He glanced at her again. She sat silent and drooping.