Margot glanced hastily round. Then she walked up to the fireplace, and drew a long breath.
“There ought to be a fire here,” she said.
“But it is summer,” I answered, wondering.
“And a chair there,” she went on, in a curious low voice, indicating—I think now, or is it my imagination?—the very spot where my grandmother was wont to sit. “Yes—I seem to remember, and yet not to remember.”
She looked at me, and her white brows were knit.
Suddenly she said: “Ronald, I don’t think I like this room. There is something—I don’t know—I don’t think I could sit here; and I seem to remember—something about it, as I did about the terrace. What can it mean?”
“It means that you are tired and overexcited, darling. Your nerves are too highly strung, and nerves play us strange tricks. Come to your own room and take off your things, and when you have had some tea, you will be all right again.”
Yes, I was fool enough to believe that tea was the panacea for an undreamed-of, a then unimaginable, evil.
I thought Margot was simply an overtired and imaginative child that evening. If I could believe so now!
We went up into her boudoir and had tea, and she grew more like herself; but several times that night I observed her looking puzzled and thoughtful, and a certain expression of anxiety shone in her blue eyes that was new to them then.