"You're too anxious to know, and too anxious to get rid of me. And you're acting nervous."
"I'm not. I'm just sleepy."
Norah, her grimmest self, as she always was just before relenting, began to fumble with her hat-pins.
"Let me help, if you really want to take off your hat. You'll spoil your beautiful roses. Darling, you look like your niece, the lovely Miss Maggie Brady, in that hat. Don't take it off. You're cross because you know where I've been. Well, they didn't eat me. I'm all here. It was Willard who came, and I don't care whether you tell me or not. And I don't want to get rid of you. And I love you and you love me, and you're not cross now."
"If I love you, you've got need of it, then." Norah struggled perfunctorily, and permitted herself to be kissed. "Alone here till all hours of the night, and Mollie at the dance at the Falls, and your own mother——"
"But you won't worry about me? And you'll go? And you'll go now, before it gets later, so you won't be frightened. You'll go this minute? And—oh, Nana——"
Norah, departing by the front door because the back one was secured by an elaborate system of locks of her own invention, and operated only by herself, turned to give Judith a farewell glance of grim adoration.
"Nana, was it Willard that came?"
"Yes."