She stood looking down, pressing back an upturned corner of the rug, upon which Joanna had knelt earlier in the evening, with the pointed toe of her beaded slipper.
"Of course I sha'n't receive her," she said. "I told Challoner my magnanimity wouldn't carry me as far as that after the abominable way in which she's exploited him. All the same, I'm rather grateful to the wretched little woman. But for her I mightn't have known how generous Challoner could be. I really believe the satisfaction of rescuing him from her clutches is among my chief reasons for accepting him—that, and then, of course, Cousin Adrian Savage."
With a sort of rush Joanna came close—the violence of some half-starved creature in her pale eyes, her drawn face and her parted lips.
"Adrian?" she cried. "Adrian? What possible connection can there be between Cousin Adrian and your engagement to Mr. Challoner?"
For some seconds Margaret Smyrthwaite looked hard and thoughtfully at her sister. Then, holding the skirt of her dress aside, she pressed the upturned corner of the rug into place again with the pointed toe of her slipper.
"I shall be so thankful," she said, "when you give up wearing that frightful old dressing-gown, Nannie. Decidedly, it is not as clean as it might be, and it looks so horridly stuffy. I never have understood your craze for hoarding—"
"But—but—Adrian?" Joanna insisted.
"Adrian? Surely you must have seen, Nannie? It's just one of those things which aren't easy to put into words, but which I should have thought even you must have grasped, though you are so different to most people. I sometimes have wondered lately, though, whether you really are so different to other people, or whether you're only extraordinarily secretive.—But, naturally having a young man like Cousin Adrian staying so long in the house this winter, put ideas into one's head and made one think a good deal about marriage, and so on. I took for granted papa had some notion of that kind when he appointed Adrian his executor. He had a great opinion of him, and would have liked him as a son-in-law—or fancied he would. Of course he wanted to bring us together—that was the object of the appointment."
"You think so?" Joanna questioned. Joy, anxious but great, arose in her.
"I haven't a doubt about it. All the same I couldn't, out of respect for papa's wishes, make advances to a young man who showed quite clearly he didn't care a row of pins about me."