“Yes; but nothing like as bad as being her niece.”
“That I can well believe. I’m glad to hear,” he added, “that you put it all in the past tense.”
She seemed to droop a little at the allusion; then she lifted her chin with a jerk of defiance. “Yes. All is at an end between us. We’ve just parted in tears—but not in silence!”
“Just parted? Do you mean to say you’ve been there all this time?”
“Ever since you used to come there to see Lady Ulrica? Does it seem to you so awfully long ago?”
The unexpectedness of the thrust—as well as its doubtful taste—chilled his growing enjoyment of her chatter. He had really been getting to like her—had recovered, under the candid approval of her eye, his usual sense of being a personable young man, with all the privileges pertaining to the state, instead of the anonymous rag of humanity he had felt himself in the crowd on the pier. It annoyed him, at that particular moment, to be reminded that naturalness is not always consonant with taste.
She seemed to guess his thought. “You don’t like my saying that you came for Lady Ulrica?” she asked, leaning over the table to pour herself a second cup of tea.
He liked her quickness, at any rate. “It’s better,” he laughed, “than your thinking I came for Mrs. Murrett!”
“Oh, we never thought anybody came for Mrs. Murrett! It was always for something else: the music, or the cook—when there was a good one—or the other people; generally one of the other people.”
“I see.”
She was amusing, and that, in his present mood, was more to his purpose than the exact shade of her taste. It was odd, too, to discover suddenly that the blurred tapestry of Mrs. Murrett’s background had all the while been alive and full of eyes. Now, with a pair of them looking into his, he was conscious of a queer reversal of perspective.
“Who were the ‘we’? Were you a cloud of witnesses?”
“There were a good many of us.” She smiled. “Let me see—who was there in your time? Mrs. Bolt—and Mademoiselle—and Professor Didymus and the
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