Eleanor was flushed with resentment.
"Well, that settles it!" she said, indignantly. "If people don't want to be helped, one can't help them. He and Zara will just have to look out for themselves, I guess. Bessie, don't you think Zara must have gone with those people in the car willingly?"
"Yes, I do," said Bessie. "But—"
"Then I think she and her father are an ungrateful pair, and they deserve anything that happens to them! I'm certainly not going to worry myself about them any more, and I should think you would drop the whole thing, Charlie Jamieson, and attend to your own affairs!"
"Hold on! You're going a bit too fast, Eleanor," he said, laughing lightly. "Let's see what Bessie thinks about it."
Bessie, who had flushed too, but not with anger, when Eleanor thus gave her resentment full play, was glad of the chance to speak.
"I do think Zara went off willingly and of her own accord," she said. "I'm sure of that, because she couldn't have been taken away without my hearing something."
"Well, then," began Eleanor, "doesn't that prove—"
"But if Zara was willing to go off that way, I believe it's because she thought she was doing the right thing," Bessie went on, determinedly. "Someone must have seen her and told her something she believed, though perhaps it wasn't true."