She also had lowered her voice, though it was high-pitched, and her speech was almost exaggeratedly confidential. Influenced by the tone into which they had thus fallen, Falconer said, meaningly and not unkindly:
“You have had to make no more serious allowances, I hope—since?”
With a laugh so light and high as to be painfully out of tune, Mrs. Romayne answered him gaily in the negative. One little peccadillo, she said, was not such a very terrible thing in a young man’s record, and she was charmed to say that with that little affair of which they both knew her anxieties on Julian’s account had begun and ended. She held out her hand to Falconer as she finished her assurance, parting with him with her brightest air of society friendliness, and as he wished her good-bye, looking down into the trivial vivacity of her face, Falconer felt himself stirred for the first time by a certain touch of pity for her. Coming upon his softer mood and the comparatively friendly nature of their talk, the eager assurance with which she spoke struck him as being not without pathos. He had no confidence in Julian, and it occurred to him vaguely and with a sense of surprise that if the security so superficially founded should prove false, the blow would be somewhat disproportionate to the lightness of the nature on which it must fall. The next instant he recollected how largely her own actions would have contributed to bring about the blow, and he dismissed her sternly from his thoughts as she passed out of the room.
Mrs. Romayne went straight home, though she had numerous calls on her list for the afternoon; her eyes were even desperately bright and defiant; and that same evening Marston Loring received a note asking him to come and see her on the following day.
He found her waiting for him in the drawing-room at the hour she had appointed, and she plunged into the matter in hand with an affectation of spontaneous confidence which was most effective.
She had sent for him in his capacity of fellow-conspirator, she told him; she was in a little perplexity and she was turning to him, as usual—this with a charming smile—to help her. From this prelude she went on to speak of the strange change which had come about in the relations between herself and Julian on the one hand, and the Pomeroys on the other. Loring’s keen eyes had detected this change some time since—by this time, indeed, it was being whispered about somewhat freely—but he only listened with grave attention. The upshot of her speech was: did Loring know anything about it? Had Julian said anything? Had he spoken of any quarrel, of any misunderstanding? Had his friend any kind of clue to give her as to his feelings on the subject?
The ease and gaiety of her manner, which strove to give to the whole thing something the air of a joke, was disturbed and broken as she came to the point by a feverishness about which there was nothing gay or light. And some uncertainty as to how far she had gone seemed to pervade her mind and to produce a feeling that some kind of explanation was necessary.
“You see,” she said, “it isn’t always safe to go to the fountain-head in these little matters! A young man doesn’t always care to be questioned by his mother! One might ‘give offence,’ you know!” Her tone was playful, but her eyes were filled with the nervous fear which lurked in them so often when she and Julian were alone together, and the look on her face as she spoke her last words seemed to give to that fear a definite object. It was the fear of “giving offence” to her son.
Loring put the explanation aside with a smile, but he had no words of enlightenment for her. Julian, he said, had preserved a total silence on the subject.