"But surely it was due to Miss Underwood that he should come to her, if he were able to go anywhere. Nothing but his inability to travel justified my coming between them in this matter in the first place."
"My dear Hugh, I hope you haven't committed Philip in any way to that impossible girl!"
He stared at her in silence, absolutely speechless.
"Of course I know you were sent as envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary," she said, with one of the sudden smiles which had so often disarmed his protests, "but that was because I was so sure I could trust everything to your discretion. And I know you haven't failed me! When you discovered that the Underwoods were the principals in a cause celèbre, surely that was enough!"
He choked down the white wrath that surged upward. The very ghastliness of the situation made it necessary that he should be very careful. He spoke, after a moment, in almost his natural voice.
"I should not be surprised at your attitude, because I remember now--though I had forgotten it until you spoke--that I had the same feeling about the matter before I had met the Underwoods themselves. After knowing them, my feeling changed. I hoped I had made my impressions of Miss Underwood clear in my letters to you."
"You made it sufficiently clear that you had been bewitched," she said, with a smile that was not wholly friendly. "Miss Underwood must be very pretty."
"Yes, she is. And she is 'nice' in every other way, too. She is a brave, staunch, noble woman,--and Philip ought to go down on his knees in thankfulness for winning her."
"You are somewhat extravagant in speech," she said coldly. "Philip Overman would hardly need to express in that fashion his gratitude for winning the daughter of a country doctor of very tarnished reputation, whose brother has also figured in the police court!"
"Did you gather that from my letters?"