Again Linda studied her with curious intentness.
"Bab," she said finally, her tone as grave as her air, "if there were someone else you loved, really loved, and you could assure yourself he was not marrying you for your money, then would you still marry David?"
Bab's breath in her amazement came swiftly.
"Someone else?" she repeated. Then she demanded: "Why do you ask?"
Linda quietly arose, as she did so picking up the driving gloves she had laid on a table near her. She began now deliberately to put them on. Changing the topic abruptly and ignoring Bab's question, she drifted toward the door. In the hall downstairs she turned with a smile and held out her hand.
"Bayard Varick will be at Eastbourne tomorrow, Bab. He's coming to us for the week-end."
XXI
Linda had said she did not love David that way! Bab's mind still clung to that speech, wrestling with it dully. Five o'clock had struck from the spire of Eastbourne church as the pony cart, with a smart cob clinking in the shafts, drifted along a shady byway in the Beeston woods. They were the same woods in which Bab had spent that first morning at Byewolde with David, but she was alone now. There was not even a groom beside her on the seat of the Hempstead cart in which she was jogging along.