'Theo,' said the elder woman significantly at last, 'is brave and cool and cunning, Brenda.'
The girl made an effort, but the old childish confidence was dead. From Theo Trist, the disciple of stoicism, she had perhaps learnt something of a creed which, if a mistaken one, renders its followers of great value in the world, for they never intrude their own private feelings upon public attention. That effort was the last. It was a beginning in itself—the first stone of a wall destined to rise between the two sisters, built by the gray hands of Time.
'But,' suggested Brenda, 'Theo is in Bulgaria.'
Mrs. Huston smiled with all the conscious power of a woman who, without being actually vain, knows the market value and the moral weight of her beauty.
'Suppose I telegraphed to him that I wanted him to come to me at once.'
Brenda fixed her eyes upon her sister's face. For a second her dainty lip quivered.
'You must not do that,' she said, in such a tone of invincible opposition that her sister changed colour, and looked somewhat hastily in another direction.
'I suppose,' murmured the elder woman after a short silence, 'that it is quite impossible to find out when he may return?'
'Quite impossible. This "Eastern Question," as it is called, is so complicated that I have given up trying to follow it—besides, I do not see what Theo has to do with the matter. We must act alone, Alice.'
'But women are so helpless.'