But Siward, outside on the veranda, was saying at that moment to his hostess: "I shall be very glad to read my mother's letter at any time you choose."
"It must be later, Stephen. I'm to cut in when Kemp sends for me. He has a lot of letters to attend to. … Tell me, what do you think of Sylvia Landis?"
"I like her, of course," he replied pleasantly.
Grace Ferrall stood thinking a moment: "That sketch you made proved a great success, didn't it?" And she laughed under her breath.
"Did it? I thought Mr. Quarrier seemed annoyed--"
"Really? What a muff that cousin of mine is. He's such a muff, you know, that the very sight of his pointed beard and pompadour hair and his complacency sets me in fidgets to stir him up."
"I don't think you'd best use me for the stick next time," said Siward. "He's not my cousin you know."
Mrs. Ferrall shrugged her boyish shoulders: "By the way"--she said curiously--"who was that girl?"
"What girl," he asked coolly, looking at his hostess, now the very incarnation of delicate mockery with her pretty laughing mouth, her boyish sunburn and freckles.
"You won't tell me I suppose?"
"I'm sorry--"
"Was she pretty, Stephen?"
"Yes," he said sulkily; "I wish you wouldn't--"
"Nonsense! Do you think I'm going to let you off without some sort of confession? If I had time now--but I haven't. Kemp has business letters: he'll be furious; so I've got to take his cards or we won't have any pennies to buy gasoline for our adored and shrieking Mercedes."
She retreated backward with a gay nod of malice, turned to enter the house, and met Sylvia Landis face to face in the hallway.
"You minx!" she whispered; "aren't you ashamed?"
"Very much, dear. What for?" And catching sight of Siward outside in the starlight, divined perhaps something of her hostess' meaning, for she laughed uneasily, like a child who winces under a stern eye.
"You don't suppose for a moment," she began, "that I have--"
"Yes I do. You always do."
"Not with that sort of man," she returned naïvely; "he won't."
Mrs. Ferrall regarded her suspiciously: "You always pick out exactly the wrong man to play with--"
They had moved back side by side into the hall, the hostess' arm linked in the arm of the younger girl.
"The wrong man?" repeated Sylvia, instinctively freeing her arm, her straight brows beginning to bend inward.
"I didn't mean that--exactly. You know how much I care for his mother--and for him." The obstinate downward trend of the brows, the narrowing blue gaze signalled mutiny to the woman who knew her so well.