The colour has deepened in Margaret's face.
'Then you think that I ought to have let her go?'
Lady Roupell is peeling a peach. She looks up from it for an instant, with a careless little shrug.
'I daresay that she would have amused herself. If she likes bear-fighting, and apple-pie beds, and practical jokes, I am sure that she would.'
'And songs?' adds Peggy, with a curling lip; 'you must not forget them.'
'Pooh!' says milady cynically; 'Prue has no ear, she would not pick them up; and, after all, Betty's bark is worse than her bite.'
'Is it?' very doubtfully.
'Why do not you go too, and look after her?' asks the elder woman, lifting her shrewd eyes from the peach, off whose naked satin she has just whipped its rosy blanket, to her companion's troubled face.
'I am not invited.'
'And you would not go if you were—eh?'