The one definite property that Prue seems to have brought back from her Harborough visit is a sickly and contemptuous disgust for whatever had formerly given her pleasure; a standard by which to measure all the conditions of her own life, and find them grossly wanting. About the visit itself she is singularly reticent. Not a word does she breathe of her own prowess in donkey tandem-driving; not a hint does she let drop of any midnight gambols.
Once and again Margaret sadly fancies that she sees faint signs of the old lifelong habit of telling her everything trying to reassert its sway; but in a moment it is checked. Often Prue seems to her sister like a child who, engaged in some naughtiness, has been charged by its confederates not to tell. And Prue does not tell. Yet, from indications which she cannot help letting fall, Peggy gathers that the visit has not been all pleasure; that fits of bitter disappointment, sharp jealousy, grisly disillusion, freaked the surface of its feverish joy. And yet Freddy had been a co-guest with her through the whole fortnight! This fact Margaret has elicited by direct inquiry; it would never have been volunteered.
'Come, Prue,' she says coaxingly, on the morning after the young girl's return, as they stroll about the garden, whose flowers Prue notices only to disparage, 'I let you off last night because you were so sleepy, but you must tell me something about your visit now. Was Freddy there?'
'Yes.'
'All the time?'
'Yes.'
'Did you see much of him?'
A slight hesitation, and then an accent of impatience:
'Of course. Were not we staying in the same house?'
'And—and—did Mr. Harborough mount you? You know, don't you—I told you, I think,' a beam of pleasure shining in her anxious blue eyes—'that milady has lent you the little gray mare for the whole winter?'