"Mustn't I bring him home, some time?" was his half-embarrassed reply.
"But not yet! And how would it suit—with week-ends and dances for
Helena?"
"It wouldn't suit at all," he said, perplexed—"though Helena seems to have thrown over dancing for the present."
"That won't last long!"
He laughed. "I am afraid you never took to her!" he said lightly.
"She never took to me!"
"I wonder if that was my fault? She suspected that I had called you in to help me to keep her in order!"
"What was it brought her to reason—so suddenly?" said Cynthia, seeking light at last on a problem that had long puzzled her.
"Two things, I imagine. First that she was the better man of us all, that day of the Dansworth riot. She could drive my big car, and none of the rest of us could! That seemed to put her right with us all. And secondly—the reports of that abominable trial. She told me so. I only hope she didn't read much of it!"
They had just passed the corner of the house, and come out on the sloping lawn of Beechmark, with the lake, and the wood beyond it. All that had happened behind that dark screen of yew, on the distant edge of the water, came rushing back on Philip's imagination, so that he fell silent. Cynthia on her side was thinking of the moment when she came down to the edge of the lake to carry off Geoffrey French, and saw Buntingford and Helena push off into the puckish rays of the searchlight. She tasted again the jealous bitterness of it—and the sense of defeat by something beyond her fighting—the arrogance of Helena's young beauty. Philip was not in love with Helena; that she now knew. So far she, Cynthia, had marvellously escaped the many chances that might have undone her. But if Helena came back?