“Oh, he’s safe for half an hour yet,” Jean reassured them, “I asked Tucker”—the Latimer’s butler, who worshipped the ground Claire walked on—“and his solicitor is still with him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have risked looking for you”—smiling. “I knew Nick was over here, and Sir Adrian might have followed me.”
“You’re sure he hasn’t?” asked Claire nervously. “He is so cunning—so stealthy.”
“Even if he had, you’re doing nothing wrong,” maintained Jean stoutly.
“Everything I do is wrong—in his eyes,” returned Claire bitterly. “That’s what makes the misery of it. If I were really wicked, really unfaithful, I should feel I deserved anything I got. But it’s enough if I’m just happy for a few minutes with a friend for him to want to punish me, to—to suspect me of any evil. Sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t bear it any longer!”
She flung out her arms in a piteous gesture of abandonment. There was something infinitely touching and forlorn about her as she stood there, as though appealing against the hideous injustice of it all, and, with a little cry Jean caught her outstretched hands and drew her into her embrace, folding her closely in her warm young arms.
Nick had turned aside abruptly, his face rather white, his mouth working. His powerlessness to help the woman he loved half maddened him.
Meanwhile Jean was crooning little, inarticulate, caressing sounds above Claire’s bowed head, until at last the latter raised a rather white face from her shoulder and smiled the small, plucky smile with which she usually managed to confront outrageous fortune.
“Thank you so much,” she said with a glint of humour in her tones. “You’ve been dears, both of you. It’s awfully nice to—to let go, sometimes. But I’m quite all right again, now.”
“Then, if you are,” replied Jean cheerfully, “perhaps you can bear up against the shock of too much joy. We want you to have ‘a day out.’”
“‘A day out’?” repeated Claire. “What do you mean?”