“Mr. Barres has not come in from luncheon.”
“Are you sure?” said the pretty, feminine voice.
“Quite sure,” replied Dulcie. “Wait a minute——”
She called Barres’s apartment; Aristocrates answered and confirmed his master’s absence with courtly effusion.
“No, he is not in,” repeated Dulcie. “Who shall I say called him?”
“Say that Miss Dunois called him up. If he comes in, say that Miss Thessalie Dunois will come at five to take tea with him. Thank you. Good-bye.”
Startled to hear the very name against which her father had warned her, Dulcie found it difficult to reconcile the sweet voice that came to her over the wire with the voice of any such person her father had described.
Still a trifle startled, she laid aside the receiver with a disturbed glance toward the wrought-iron door at the further end of the hall.
She had no desire at all to call up her father at Grogan’s and inform him of what had occurred. The mere thought of surreptitious listening in, of eavesdropping, of informing, reddened her face. Also, she had long since lost confidence in the somewhat battered but jaunty man who had always neglected her, although never otherwise unkind, even when intoxicated.
No, she would neither listen in nor inform on anybody at the behest of a father for whom, alas, she had no respect, merely those shreds of conventional feeling 83 which might once have been filial affection, but had become merely an habitual solicitude.