There was no reply to that. She sat down. “They were too much for me!” she lamented. “If I’d had the least hint, I might have held my own. As it was—I let them make a fool of me.”
“You are talking hieroglyphics to me. Who are ‘they’?”
“Douglas, and that old fox, Rossiter Torrance.”
“Rossiter Torrance?” I repeated the name, and then suddenly remembered. The thin-lipped old family lawyer!
“He sent up his card, and said he’d been sent to see me by Mary Abbot. Of course, I had no suspicion—I fell right into the trap. We talked about you for a while—he even got me to tell him where you lived; and then at last he told me that he hadn’t come from you at all, but had merely wanted to find out if I knew you, and how intimate we were. He had been sent by Douglas; and he wanted to know right away how much I had told you about Douglas, and why I had done it. Of course, I denied that I had told anything. Heavens, what a time he gave me!”
Claire paused. “Mary, how could you have played such a trick upon me?”
“I had no thought of doing you any harm,” I replied. “I was simply trying to help Sylvia.”
“To help her at any expense!”
“Tell me, what will come of it? Are you afraid they’ll cut off your allowance?”
“That’s the threat.”