“Caught you at it!” he reproved gaily. “Secret tippling. The gravest of symptoms. Little I thought, the day I stood up with you, that the wife I was marrying was doomed to fill an alcoholic’s grave.”
Before she could retort, a young man strolled in whom she and Dick greeted as Mr. Winters, and who also must have a cocktail. Dick tried to believe that it was not relief he sensed in Paula’s manner as she greeted the newcomer. He had never seen her quite so cordial to him before, although often enough she had met him. At any rate, there would be three at lunch.
Mr. Winters, an agricultural college graduate and special writer for the Pacific Rural Press, as well as a sort of protégé of Dick, had come for data for an article on California fish-ponds, and Dick mentally arranged his afternoon’s program for him.
“Got a telegram from Evan,” he told Paula. “Won’t be back till the four o’clock day after to-morrow.”
“And after all my trouble!” she exclaimed. “Now the lilacs will be wilted and spoiled.”
Dick felt a warm glow of pleasure. There spoke his frank, straightforward Paula. No matter what the game was, or its outcome, at least she would play it without the petty deceptions. She had always been that way—too transparent to make a success of deceit.
Nevertheless, he played his own part by a glance of scarcely interested interrogation.
“Why, in Graham’s room,” she explained. “I had the boys bring a big armful and I arranged them all myself. He’s so fond of them, you know.”
Up to the end of lunch, she had made no mention of Mrs. Wade’s coming, and Dick knew definitely she was not coming when Paula queried casually:
“Expecting anybody?”