"I'm an easy hundred ahead so I can't kick. Let 'er go."
She stepped back into the darkness to round the conservatory wing and brushed the mudguard of a lightless limousine. A girl's voice strained, tremulous, and laughing lent caution to her retreating steps; but she stopped within listening distance.
"Don't, Freddie! I'll have to go in if you——"
"Oh, come, Ada! Be a sport."
"Do behave yourself. Get me another drink."
"All right."
As the man stepped out, Pat shrank behind the car. She had recognized the girl's voice as that of Ada Clare, who had the reputation of being an indiscriminate "necker." Pat passed on. But that whisper from within the limousine, with its defensive, nervous, eager, stimulated effect, troubled the eavesdropper with strange, disturbing surmises. She wanted, yet feared to return and wait until Fred Browning, a man of thirty, well-liked in the neighbourhood, not the less perhaps because of his reputation as a "goer," came back with the desired drink. What would be the next step in the unseen drama? A little stir of fear drove Pat onward. She stopped abruptly at the end of the conservatory as she heard her mother's voice within.
"Oh, Sid, dear! I almost wish I hadn't told you."
Sid! That was Sidney Rathbone, a Baltimorean, much given to running over for week-ends. To Pat's mind he was stricken in years, being nearly forty, but the most distinguished looking (thus her mentally italicised characterisation) person she had ever seen and distantly adored. Furthermore there was a quietly knightly devotion in his attitude toward the beautiful Mrs. Fentriss which enlisted the submerged romanticism of the child's mind. Now she hardly recognised the usually smooth and gentle tones characteristic of him as he replied:
"My God, Mona! I can't believe it. I won't believe it."