She looked up at me with a question in her face, but I did not understand until she spoke, that what had been keeping back her confession was not doubt of my trustworthiness but her fear of losing my good opinion.
“I expect you’ll think it was horrid of me,” she said.
I made inarticulate sounds intended to convey an effect of reassurance.
“You will,” she insisted, and gave her protest a value that I felt to be slightly compromising. I could only infer that the loss of my good opinion would be fatal to her future happiness.
“Indeed, I shan’t,” I protested, although I had to say it in a tone that practically confirmed this talk of ours as a perfectly genuine flirtation.
“Men have such queer ideas of honour in these things,” she went on with a recovering confidence.
“Do you mean that you—peeped,” I said. “Into Brenda’s room?”
She made a moue that I ought to have found fascinating, nodding emphatically.
“The door wasn’t locked, then?” I put in.
She shook her head and blushed again; and I guessed in a flash that she had used the keyhole.