“May I come in?” drawled Mrs. Wilmington's mellow voice, and Annie turned and saw Lyra peering round the edge of the half-opened library door. “I've been discreetly hemming and scraping and hammering on the wood-work so as not to overhear, and I'd have gone away if I hadn't been afraid of being overheard.”
“Oh, come in, Lyra,” said Annie; and she hoped that she had kept the spirit of resignation with which she spoke out of her voice.
Dr. Morrell jumped up with an apparent desire to escape that wounded and exasperated her. She put out her hand quite haughtily to him and asked, “Oh, must you go?”
“Yes. How do you do, Mrs. Wilmington? You'd better get Miss Kilburn to give you a cup of her coffee.”
“Oh, I will,” said Lyra. She forbore any reference, even by a look, to the intimate little situation she had disturbed.
Morrell added to Annie: “I like your plan. It's the best thing you could do.”
She found she had been keeping his hand, and in the revulsion from wrath to joy she violently wrung it.
“I'm so glad!” She could not help following him to the door, in the hope that he would say something more, but he did not, and she could only repeat her rapturous gratitude in several forms of incoherency.
She ran back to Mrs. Wilmington. “Lyra, what do you think of my taking Mr. Peck's little girl?”
Mrs. Wilmington never allowed herself to seem surprised at anything; she was, in fact, surprised at very few things. She had got into the easiest chair in the room, and she answered from it, with a luxurious interest in the affair, “Well, you know what people will say, Annie.”