“Probably.”
“Well, I’d have the one I’d chanced it all for.”
“Yes,” said the Duchessa slowly and deliberately, “but you’d have to be very sure, not only that the friend was worth it, but that you were worth it to the friend.”
There was rather a blank silence. Trix gave a little gasp. It was not so much the words that hurt, as the tone in which they had been spoken. It was a repetition of the little scene at dinner, but this time intensified. And it was so utterly, so entirely unlike Pia. Trix felt miserably squashed. She had been talking a good deal too, perhaps, indeed, rather foolishly, that was the worst of it. No doubt she had made rather an idiot of herself. She swallowed a little lump in her throat. Well, anyhow that inflection in Pia’s tone must be covered at once. That was the first, indeed the only, consideration.
“I never thought of all those contingencies,” she laughed. There was the faintest suspicion of a quiver in her voice. “Let’s talk about the moonlight. But it was the moonlight began it all.”
Two hours later the garden lay deserted in the same moonlight.
A woman was sitting by an open window, looking out into the garden. She had been sitting there quite a long time. Suddenly her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Trix, Trix,” she said half aloud, “if only it would work. But it won’t. And it was the moonlight that began it all.”