“Ah! I see you understand,” he observed, watching her with some amusement.
She looked at him with a desperate demand in her eyes.
“Brett, what did you mean to do? What was your plan—if Ann had come?” she asked in a low, shaken voice.
He laughed.
“Can’t you guess? Really, Cara, I think I complimented you on your perspicacity too soon! It seems to be—halting a little, shall we say?—now.”
“You didn’t ask her here just for the pleasure it would give you—there was something else—”
“It was partly for that. I at least made sure of a few hours alone with her!” A note of passion roughened his voice for a moment. Then he forced it back and his blue eyes laughed at her again, audaciously. “But it was partly for the displeasure which I thought it might give to some one else.”
“Eliot!”
“Even so. He’s not got precisely what you’d call an equable temperament, has he?”
“And you knew”—slowly—“that if he discovered Ann had been here—”