“I don’t know! I don’t know!” she said brokenly. “It’s all wrong, somehow. You ought not to be forced into such a position, but I don’t blame you, Cecil. It’s the other women who deserve the blame, the women who are better off, and could have opened their houses. You have been so drearily dull all these long years that you would have been more than human to refuse. But now, dear, now that you are engaged, surely he has some friends to whom he could introduce you?”
Mary Rhodes shook her head.
“Not till his people know. It might come round to their ears, and that would make things more difficult still; but I am hoping it won’t be long. Now, Claire, I’ve told you, because you are such a kind understanding little soul, and it’s a comfort to talk things out; but I’ll kill you if you dare to breathe a word to another soul—Sophie Blake, or Mrs Willoughby, or even your mother when you write to her. You can never tell how these things are repeated, and Frank would never forgive me if it came out through me. Promise faithfully that you’ll never mention his name in connection with me.”
“Of course I will. What do you take me for? I shouldn’t dream of doing such a thing!”
“Of course, at the Willoughbys’, for instance, if anyone did mention his name—they might, quite well, for I should think they were in much the same set—there would be no harm in saying that you’d heard of him. I should rather like to hear what they said.”
Cecil’s face looked wistful as she spoke these last words, but the next moment her expression changed to one of pure amazement as the whirr of the cuckoo clock made itself heard, and the little brown bird hopped out of its niche, and sounded five clear notes.
“Gracious, what’s that? Where did that come from?”
“It was a Christmas present to me from abroad.”
Claire added the last words in the fond hope that they would save further criticism, and Cecil rose from her seat, and stood in front of the hanging clock examining it with critical eyes.
“It’s a good one. Most of them are so gimcrack. From abroad? One of your Belgian friends, I suppose? Does it make that awful row every hour? I can’t stand it here, you know, if it does.”