"Well?" inquired Mrs. Vendenning, looking up at the tall, pale girl she was chaperoning so carefully during their sojourn in town.
"Oh, you know the rhyme to that," yawned Agatha; "let's ring up somebody. I'm bored stiff."
"What did Howard Quarrier want?"
"He knows, I think, but he hasn't yet informed me."
"I'll tell you one thing, Agatha," said Mrs. Vendenning, gathering up the packs for a new shuffle: "Grace Ferrall doesn't fancy Howard's attention to you and she's beginning to say so. When you go back to Shotover you'd better let him alone."
"I'm not going back to Shotover," said Agatha.
"What?"
"No; I don't think so. However, I'll let you know to-morrow. It all depends--but I don't expect to." She turned as her maid tapped on the door. "Oh, Captain Voucher. Are you at home to him?" flipping the pasteboard onto the table among the scattered cards.
"Yes," said Mrs. Vendenning aggressively, "unless you expect him to flop down on his knees to-night. Do you?"
"I don't--to-night. Perhaps to-morrow. I don't know; I can't tell yet." And to her maid she nodded that they were at home to Captain Voucher.
Quarrier had met him, too, just as he was leaving the hotel lobby. They exchanged the careful salutations of men who had no use for one another. On the Englishman's clean-cut face a deeper hue settled as he passed; on Quarrier's, not a trace of emotion; but when he entered his motor he sat bolt upright, stiff-backed and stiff-necked, his long gray-gloved fingers moving restlessly over his pointed heard.
The night was magnificent; myriads of summer stars spangled the heavens. Even in the reeking city itself a slight freshness grew in the air, although there was no wind to stir the parched leaves of the park trees, among which fire-flies floated--their intermittent phosphorescence breaking out with a silvery, star-like brilliancy.
Plank, driving his big motor northward through the night, Leila Mortimer beside him, twice mistook the low glimmer of a fire-fly for the distant lamp of a motor, which amused Leila, and her clear, young laughter floated back to the ears of Sylvia and Siward, curled up in their corners of the huge tonneau. But they were too profoundly occupied with each other to heed the sudden care-free laughter of the young matron, though in these days her laughter was infrequent enough to set the more merciless tongues wagging when it did sound.
Plank had never seen fit to speak to her of her husband's scarcely veiled menace that day he had encountered him in the rotunda of the Algonquin Trust Company. His first thought was to do so--to talk it over with her, consider the threat and the possibility of its seriousness, and then come to some logical and definite decision as to what their future relations should be. Again and again he had been on the point of doing this when alone with Leila--uncomfortable, even apprehensive, because of their frank intimacy; but he had never had the opportunity to do so without deliberately dragging in the subject by the ears in all its ugliness and implied reproach for her imprudence, and seeing that dreadful, vacant change in Leila's face, which the mere mention of her husband's name was sure to bring, turn into horror unspeakable.