As he did so, he examined her sharply and she looked at him with what he thought might be pain or fear or horror in her glance. Certainly it was not a look disguising a sympathetic interest in the plans of her friends or employers, if they were such. Her astonishment was so obviously sincere, confusing, revealing, in a way that it all but won him. He could not make himself believe that she had had a hand in that anyhow. It must be as Blount said, that she was more of a tool herself than anything else. She probably couldn’t help herself very well or didn’t know the lengths to which her pretended “friends” were prepared to go. Her eyes seemed troubled, sad. She seemed weaker, more futile, than at any time since he had known her, and this, while it did not add particularly to his respect, softened his personal animosity. He felt that under the circumstances he might come to like her. He also thought that she might be made to like him enough to help him. He had the emotional mastery of her, he thought, and that was something. He had described the incident with all the vividness of detail that he could, showing how he and Blount had escaped death by a hair’s breadth. She seemed a little sick, and shortly after left the table. Gregory had taken good care to make it plain that the strangers in the other car had been informed as to the exact details of the case, and had offered their services as witnesses in case they were wanted.
“But we don’t propose to do anything about it,” he said genially, “not now, anyhow,” and it was then that she seemed to become a little sick or faint, and left him.
Whether owing to this conversation or the accident itself, or to circumstances concerning which he knew nothing, there now seemed to come a temporary lull in the activities of this group. The Blue Trailer disappeared as an active daily fact in their lives. Mrs. Skelton was called to the city on business for a few days, as well as Mr. Diamondberg, the “cloak and suit man,” as Blount always called him, who in all the time he had been there had never publicly joined them. Mrs. Skelton came back later as cheerful and optimistic as ever, but in the meanwhile there had been an approach on the part of Imogene toward himself which seemed to promise a new order of things. She was freer, more natural and more genial than she had been hitherto. She was with him more, smiling, playful, and yet concerned, he thought. Because of their conversation the morning after the accident, he felt easier in her presence, more confidential, as though he might be able to talk to her about all this soon and get her to help him.
They had two hours together on the second afternoon of the absence of the others which brought them within sight of each other’s point of view. It began after lunch, because Gregory had some reports to examine and was staying here to do it. She came over and stood beside him.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m looking up some facts,” he replied enigmatically, smiling up at her. “Sit down.”
They fell into conversation first about a tennis match which was being held here, and then about his work, which he described in part after observing that she knew all about it, or ought to.
“Why do you always talk to me that way about everything in connection with you?” she asked after a moment’s pause. “You have such a queer way of speaking, as though I knew something I ought not to know about your affairs.”
“Well, you do, don’t you?” he questioned grimly, staring at her.
“Now, there it is again! What do you mean by that?”