Leslie did not reply at once. She hesitated for a moment then said in an odd, repressed tone: “I think I used to know him.”
CHAPTER XVI.
ONLY OBEYING ORDERS
“Will you kindly tell me why you are here?” Leslie Cairns surveyed her chaperon, Mrs. Gaylord, with an anything but welcoming face. “Didn’t you understand my letter? It was written in English. At least, I thought I wrote English.” Leslie used sarcastic emphasis.
“Yes, Leslie, your letter was in English, I suppose your rude slang might be classed as English.” The chaperon’s voice was bitingly dry. Her florid, usually placid features were stiff with resentment of Leslie’s cavalier manner. “You took advantage of me in a most unfair way. Instead of writing me that you thought of going to New York to spend the holidays, you simply notified me at the last minute, completely ignoring me as your chaperon.”
“Oh, cut out the lecture!” Leslie made a derisive motion as though to push further rebuke from her. “What is the matter with you? Doesn’t our agreement hold good in New York as well as in Hamilton? Couldn’t we have got together in a few hours if necessary? I allowed for all that when I wrote you. I didn’t think it urgent to put it down in black and white. I gave you credit for having some gray matter. Who engaged you in the first place, my father, or I? He saw fit to butt in to my arrangement with you. Of course I’m not supposed to know that. Still it wouldn’t take me long to remind him of it, if he began to be fussy with me.” Displeasure of her father’s private understanding with Mrs. Gaylord momentarily banished Leslie’s regret of their estrangement.
“Leslie! I hope you would not be so treacherous as to let your father know that you—that he—that you know he and I have a private understanding about you,” stammered the chaperon in reproachful alarm. “That is a secret agreement between him and me.”
“Was a secret, you mean,” satirized Leslie, laughing with a kind of grotesque amusement. “A secret isn’t much of a secret after it goes as far as a third party.”
“Leslie!” Mrs. Gaylord repeated the name with exclamatory half-hearted wrath.
“Yes, ‘Leslie,’” mimicked her amused charge. “What’s the use of puffing, Gaylord? You know you always lose out with me in a talk contest. Sit down, take off your hat and your head will cool off. Registered at our village inn?” she raised ironic eyebrows at her chaperon.