Then she left him, a shade too rapidly for dignity, and sprang into the cart, before he could get near enough to help her up.
"Quita . . . why did you do that? What's wrong?" he asked, lamely enough as he gathered up the reins.
"Need you add insult to injury by asking that?" she flashed out, angry tears pricking her eyeballs. "I'm wrong. You're wrong. Everything's wrong. I ought never to have come here . . . before I was wanted."
He made no comment on that. It was not a question to be discussed in the open road, with a sais jogging on the tail-board behind; and no more was said till they reached home.
Then, as Eldred pressed the reins under the clip, he said in a quiet tone of command: "Stay where you are, please, till I can get round." And for all the rebellion in her blood, she obeyed.
He lifted her out bodily, and drew her into the hall. It was empty and almost dark: and before she guessed his intent, his lips had touched hers lightly, with a quick sigh that told of passion held in check. But she broke away from him, unappeased, and shut herself into her room.
She was relieved to find that a sprinkling of the tea party—the Ollivers, Norton, and Richardson—had stayed to dinner. Olliver was her partner; and evinced his appreciation of the fact by chaffing her laboriously throughout the meal; the one form of conversation she frankly detested.
But Richardson sat on her right, and, in Olliver's phraseology, "made the running with her all the time." For good, single-hearted Max frankly admired her. His conscience pricked him more acutely than it had yet done at thought of his own responsibility for the wasted years; and he longed for a chance to say as much to his friend. But Lenox was not in a mood to talk about his wife; and Richardson got no word in private with him throughout the evening.
Frank Olliver left early; and as Desmond half-lifted his wife from the sofa, Quita came up and said good-night also. She had been watching these two with reawakened interest throughout the afternoon and evening, and wondering whether she and Eldred could ever arrive at such perfect community of heart and mind.
In passing her husband, she laid butterfly finger-tips upon his coat-sleeve. "Good-night, mon ami," she said, just framing the words with her lips: and before he could get a square look at her, she was gone.