"I must—even at the risk of making you angry at me. Of course, John and Rodrigo have always been close friends, almost like brothers. Even in that dreadful Sophie Binner mess, John stood by him. Rodrigo is in many ways a fine man, but he has the continental ideas of love, you know. He scoffs at our American worship of faithfulness. He has been the hero of so many affairs, known so many worldly women, that I am sure the thought of marriage has never entered his head. He could never settle down and make a wife happy."
"You misjudge him—you must!" Mary said hoarsely, but her defense did not even convince herself. Elise was but putting into brutal words the answer Mary herself did not want to give to the questions which had been agitating her mind and heart for months. And who could say that Elise's answer was not the true one? The past of Rodrigo was undeniable. And what proof was there, Mary forced herself to ask, that he had not been playing with her too?
"You are so invaluable here," Elise went on caressingly. "It would be a shame if—that is, Rodrigo would be the first to blame himself if his thoughtlessness compelled you to——"
But in that veiled threat, Elise went just a little too far. Amid the confusion in Mary Drake's mind came a flash of intuition. She relaxed her tense posture and stared at Elise quietly. She understood what the wife of John Dorning was driving at now—what it meant to her own relations with Rodrigo. Mary made a sudden radical decision.
She said quietly to Elise, "I understand you, Mrs. Dorning. I understand both Count Torriani—and you. In any case I am leaving—at the end of the week."
"Oh, I didn't know that," Elise replied sympathetically, striving to keep the relief out of her voice. She had accomplished her purpose far more completely and with less effort than she had anticipated. This puritanical miss, she had realized, must be eliminated. And now, it developed, the good angel was eliminating herself.
Both women looked up quickly as the door opened to admit Rodrigo. Without a word Mary turned and walked out past him with such a white and troubled countenance that, his eyes turned grave and followed her questioningly. When he shifted them to Elise, there was a glint of accusation in their dark depths, though he said nothing about Mary. Instead he greeted the wife of his friend with a colorless "This is a surprise."
"Is it?" she asked in a voice of velvet, resolving to humor him. "I am merely following John's instructions. He said you were to take me to tea, dinner, and the concert at Aeolian Hall later."
"That was before the old boy telegraphed me all this extra work," he said with affected good nature. What the devil, he was asking himself, had she said to Mary—if anything? He said to Elise pointedly, indicating the bulging brief case he laid upon the desk, "I'll have to work here every minute on this stuff until I catch the midnight train for Philadelphia, if I'm to have things shipshape bright and early in the morning as John instructed."
Her face clouded with annoyance. What an evasive, exasperating man he was. But the very fact that he was going to such lengths to avoid being alone with her only added stimulus to the game for Elise. "You're really going to stay in this stuffy place until midnight?" she asked casually.