“But why—but why?” insisted Nora. “Oh, Connie!—as if Douglas Falloden could look after anybody but himself!”
Then she repented a little. Connie smiled, rather coldly.
“He looked after his father,” she said quietly. “I told you all that in my letters. And you forget how it was—that he and Otto came across each other again.”
Nora warmly declared that she had not forgotten it, but that it did not seem to her to have anything to do with the extraordinary proposal that the man more responsible than any one else for the maiming—possibly for the death—of Otto Radowitz, if all one heard about him were true, should be now installed as his companion and guardian during these critical months.
She talked with obvious and rather angry common sense, as one who had not passed her eighteenth birthday for nothing.
But Connie fell silent. She would not discuss it, and Nora was obliged to let the subject drop.
Mrs. Hooper, whose pinched face had grown visibly older, received her husband’s niece with an evident wish to be kind. Alice, too, was almost affectionate, and Uncle Ewen came hurrying out of his study to greet her. But Connie had not been an hour in the house before she had perceived that everybody in it was preoccupied and unhappy; unless, indeed, it were Alice, who had evidently private thoughts of her own, which, to a certain extent, released her from the family worries.
What was the matter? She was determined to know.
It happened that she and Alice went up to bed together. Nora had been closeted with her father in the little schoolroom on the ground floor, since nine o’clock, and when Connie proposed to look in and wish them good night, Alice said uncomfortably—