She was looking at the door with surprised eyes. There stood Verena, her bonnet on; evidently just come in.
Verena tripped forward, bent down, and kissed her sister. “Have you been desperately angry, Coral?” she lightly asked, giving me her hand to shake. “I know papa has.”
“I have not been angry,” was Coralie’s equable answer: “but you have acted childishly, Verena. And now, where have you been?”
“Only in Woburn Place, at Mrs. Ball’s,” said Verena, throwing off her bonnet, and bringing her lovely flushed face close to the light as she sat down. “When I left here that evening—and really, Johnny, I was sorry not to stay and go in to dinner with you,” she broke off, with a smile—“I went straight to our old lodgings, to good old Mother Ball. ‘They are frightful tyrants at home,’ I said to her, ‘I’m not sure but they’ll serve me as Bluebeard did his wives; and I want to stay with you for a day or two.’ There’s where I have been all the time, Coral; and I wondered you and papa did not come to look for me.”
“It is where I fancied you might be,” returned Coral. “But I only thought of it on Saturday night. Does that mean check, Johnny?”
“Check and mate, mademoiselle.”
“Oh, how wicked you are!”
“Mrs. Ball has been more careful of me than she’d be of gold,” went on Vera, her blue eyes dancing. “The eldest daughter, Louise, is at home now: she teaches music in a school: and, if you’ll believe me, Coral, the old mother would never let me stir out without Louise. When Edward Pym came up in the evening to take me for a walk, Louise must go with us. ‘I feel responsible to your papa and sister, my dear,’ the old woman would say to me. Oh, she was a veritable dragon.”
“Was Louise with you when you went on board the Rose of Delhi yesterday afternoon?” cried Coralie, while I began to put away the chessmen.