Noting the honest eyes, the widow believed, yet could not refrain from teasing. “Yet—a week ago you hardly gave her a thought.”
He looked at her in naive wonder. “Isn’t it queer—how sudden it gets you?”
She nodded. “That’s the beauty of it.”
[XXII: LEE, TOO, IS CONFESSED]
As, in the seclusion of Lee’s bedroom that night, she and the widow sat side by side, talking at each other in the wide mirror while making their night toilets, a “movie-man” would have given his head to reproduce the scene with its witcheries in the way of unbound hair, filmy white, glimpses of polished shoulders. But in his absence these may be left where they belong—behind the secure guard of Lee’s oaken door. Sufficient for the present is their conversation.
“So we’ve engaged ourself, have we?” As with Gordon, Mrs. Mills went straight to the bat.
“Why—” Pausing with comb and one yellow curl held in midair, Lee looked her utter surprise at the smiling face in the glass. “Mary Mills! whoever told you?”
“This and these would be enough.” The widow touched the girl’s pale cheeks and shadowed eyes. “But I caught your young man, coming in, and made him confess. So we got mad—because he kissed another girl, and took it out of him by engaging ourself on the spot? Oh, you little fool!”
Dropping the curl, Lee straightened and stiffened till she looked in the filmy nightrobe like a cold and classic marble. “If it had been Phyllis or Phœbe Lovell, or any other nice girl, I wouldn’t have cared. But—a peona.”
“Well, what of it?” Assured, now, of the truth of her surmises, the widow went confidently forward. “She’s mighty pretty.”