X.
Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was looking out of the other window, started significantly back.
“What is it, Alice?”
“Nothing! Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his——”
“Which friend? But where? Don't look! They will think we were watching them. I can't see them at all. Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly betraying this anxiety to her daughter.
Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room. “They are coming this way,” she said indifferently.
Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home. “Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend. “Were you going, Alice? Better stay. It would be awkward sending out for you. You look well enough.”
“Well!”
The young men came in, Mavering with his nervous laugh first, and then Boardman with his twinkling black eyes, and his main-force self-possession.