There was a long silence. Then Delilah seemed to shake herself, as one shakes off a trance. She pushed the ball away from her with a sudden gesture. "There's nothing," she said, in a stifled voice; "there's really nothing to tell, Leila."
"I knew that you'd back out with all of us here to listen," Porter triumphed.
But Colin saw more than that.
"I think we want our tea," he said, "while it is hot," and he handed Delilah the cups, and busied himself to help her with the sugar and lemon, and to pass the little cakes, and all the time he talked in his pleasant half-cynical, half-earnest fashion, until their minds were carried on to other things.
When at last they had gone, he came back to her quickly.
"What was it?" he asked. "What did you see in the ball?"
She shivered. "It was Barry. Oh, Colin, I don't really believe in it—perhaps it was just my imagination because I am worried about Leila, but I saw Barry looking at me with such a white strange face out of the dark."
CHAPTER XXI
In Which a Little Lady in Black Comes to Washington to Witness the Swearing-in of a Gentleman and a Scholar.