What should he do? How get it away from her before the mischief was done?
“What have you there, Mollie?” he inquired, assuming an indifferent tone. “Oh, it is the commencement program,” he added. “Come, don’t get absorbed in that just now, there will be time enough by and by to look it over, and I want you, who are so clever at reading faces, to tell me what you think of this.”
He playfully laid hold of the booklet in her hands and attempted to withdraw it from her.
She tightened her grasp upon it, for almost at that instant she had caught sight of the name which he was so anxious to keep from her.
She started slightly as she comprehended the situation; then her beautiful eyes flashed up to her companion’s face, and he shrank back from the scorn in them as if from a blow.
Mollie was as pale as marble, but there was a haughty poise to her small head, and a sudden stiffening of her whole form that actually made him cringe before her.
“Why did you not tell me that Clifford Faxon was a classmate of yours?” she demanded in icy tones.
CHAPTER XXI.
PHILIP WENTWORTH PUT ON PROBATION.
Philip Wentworth had never felt meaner in all his life than at that moment, when he realized that his duplicity was exposed, and that the girl whose esteem, of all others, he cared most to preserve had found him out, if not exactly as a liar, as having been wilfully and contemptibly deceptive. He flushed crimson, and then grew as pale as Mollie herself, but he was dumb before her for the moment, and could find no voice to answer her imperative demand.