The little group of friends drew closer together.
“Don’t you see what it means?” broke out Claire in a low voice of intense anger. “It’s been all a trick—a trick! He never meant to go to London at all. He only pretended to me that he was going, so that I should think that I was free and he could trap me.” She looked at Nick and Jean significantly. “He must have overheard us—that day in the shrubbery at Charnwood—you remember?” They both nodded. “And then planned to humiliate me in front of half the county.”
“But you won’t go back with him?” exclaimed Nick hotly. He swung round and addressed the chauffeur stormily. “You can damn well tell your master that her ladyship will return this evening with the rest of the party.” The man’s face twitched. As far as it is possible for a well-drilled servant’s face to express the human emotion of compassion, his did so.
“It would be no good, sir,” he said in a low voice. “He means her ladyship to come. ‘Go and fetch her away, Langton,’ was his actual words to me. I didn’t want the job, sir, as you may guess.”
“Well, she’s not coming, that’s all,” declared Nick determinedly.
“Oh, I must, Nick—I must go,” cried Claire in distress. “I—I daren’t stay.”
Lady Anne nodded.
“Yes, I think she must go, Nick dear,” she said persuasively. “It would he—-wiser.”
“But it’s damnable!” ejaculated Nick furiously. “It’s only done to insult her—to humiliate her!”
Claire smiled a little wistfully.