"No." The door had opened immediately before he spoke and Kitty herself came quickly into the room. "No," she answered him. "You needn't wait for me to come back. I returned yesterday."
"Kitty!"
With a cry like some tortured captive thing Nan wrenched herself free and fled to Kitty's side.
"Kitty! Tell him—tell him I can't marry him now! Not yet—oh, I can't!"
Kitty patted her arm reassuringly.
"Don't worry," she answered. Then she turned to Roger.
"Your wedding will have to be postponed, Roger," she said Quietly.
"Nan's uncle died early this morning."
She watched the tense anger and suspicion die swiftly out of his eyes.
The death of a relative, necessarily postponing Nan's marriage,
appealed to that curious conventional strain in him, inherited from
Lady Gertrude.
"Lord St. John dead?" he repeated. "Nan, why didn't you tell me? I should have understood if I'd known that. I wouldn't have worried you." He was full of shocked contrition and remorse.
Kitty felt she had been disingenuous. But she had sheltered Nan from the cave-man that dwelt in Roger—oddly at variance with the streak of conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up. And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had always sought to serve her.