The Southerner subdued the slight crease that formed itself about his silent lips, then he again turned his sallow face toward his brilliant neighbour. He was deliberately and calmly in love with her, and his chief pleasure in life was to hear her talk.
Miss Gastonguay could not help discussing Derrice, who had been thrown like a bombshell into her quiet life. "What a contrast she is to Chelda," she purred in Justin's ear. "My niece is a woman of the world; your wife is an emancipated baby. Chelda is devoted to me, and will be jealous of any attention I bestow on an outsider. I wish they could be friends. I suppose we could not tell her?" And the wistfulness of an advancing old age that would fain lean upon youth crept into her tone.
Justin was alarmed. He had confided his secret to Miss Gastonguay as he would have confided it to another man. He had supposed her strong-mindedness to be invulnerable, and now she was proposing to unfold this secret to some one against whom he had a secret and unconquerable prejudice.
"Most decidedly not," he replied.
"You are a time-seeking, mercenary young man," said Miss Gastonguay, slapping about on her plate an unoffending morsel of potato. "You favoured me with your great mystery in order that I might remember your wife in my will. I shall do nothing of the sort."
"Any one who shirks a duty is sure to suffer for it sometime or another," he said, calmly, "but I am not afraid of your forgetting that my wife has an equal claim on you with your niece."
"Well, I shall have a thorny road to travel," said Miss Gastonguay, with unexpected submission. "Chelda will rebel."
"I beg that you will give her no cause to do so. My appeal was made to you for protection in the event of my death. There is no favour I am willing for my wife to accept from you now, beyond a friendly recognition. You can understand that I wish her to lead a quiet life."
"I like her," said Miss Gastonguay, stubbornly. "I shall do what I please for her."
Aurelia Sinclair, who was Justin's left-hand neighbour, suddenly turned to him with some curiosity painted on her transparent face, and warned that he was carrying on a dangerous conversation, he abruptly addressed a question to her.