Mrs. Ware turned a beaming face. "Can't you guess, darling? Oh, Austin, there's no living woman whom I would sooner call my daughter. You've made me so happy."
The facile tears came, and she sat down and dried them on her little wisp of handkerchief.
"I thought it for the best to tell your mother, Austin," said Katherine, somewhat apologetically. "We were speaking of you--and--I couldn't keep it back."
Viviette, white-lipped and dazed, looked at Austin, Katherine, and Dick in turns. She said, in the high-pitched voice, to Austin:
"Have you asked Katherine to marry you?"
"Yes," he replied, not quite so confidently, and avoiding her glance--"and she has done me the honour of accepting me."
Katherine held out a conciliatory hand to Viviette. "Won't you congratulate me, dear?"
"And Austin, too," said Mrs. Ware.
But Viviette lost control of herself. "I'll congratulate nobody," she cried shrilly. She burned with a sense of intolerable outrage. Only a few hours before she had been befooled into believing herself to be the mistress of the destinies of two men. Both had offered her their love. Both had kissed her. The memory lashed her into fury. Now one of them avowed that she had been merely the object of a drunken passion, and the other came before her as the affianced husband of the woman who called herself her dearest friend.
Katherine, in deep distress, laid her hand on the girl's arm. "Why not, dear? I thought that you and Dick--in fact--I understood--"