I pursed my mouth and shook my head. "It would be too risky to deceive us as crudely as that," I said. "Make it so much more significant if we discovered that they had been lying about her."
Miss Tattersall looked obstinate, putting on that wooden enduring expression peculiar to fair people with pale eyes.
"I don't believe she has come back," she said.
I continued to argue. I guessed that she had some piece of evidence in reserve; also, that for some reason she was afraid to produce it. And at last, as I had hoped, my foolish, specious arguments and apparent credulity irritated her to a pitch of exasperation.
"Oh! you can talk till all's blue," she broke in with a flash of temper, "but she hasn't come back."
"I know she hasn't," Miss Tattersall said, and the pink of her cheeks spread to her forehead and neck like an overflowing stain.
I realised that the moment had come for conciliation. "This is tremendously interesting," I said.
She looked up at me with a question in her face, but I did not understand until she spoke, that what had been keeping back her confession was not doubt of my trustworthiness but her fear of losing my good opinion.
"I expect you'll think it was horrid of me," she said.
I made inarticulate sounds intended to convey an effect of reassurance.
"You _will_," she insisted, and gave her protest a value that I felt to be slightly compromising. I could only infer that the loss of my good opinion would be fatal to her future happiness.
"Indeed, I shan't," I protested, although I had to say it in a tone that practically confirmed this talk of ours as a perfectly genuine flirtation.
"Men have such queer ideas of honour in these things," she went on with a recovering confidence.
"Do you mean that you--peeped," I said. "Into Brenda's room?"
She made a _moue_ that I ought to have found fascinating, nodding emphatically.
"The door wasn't locked, then?" I put in.
She shook her head and blushed again; and I guessed in a flash that she had used the keyhole.
"But could you be sure?" I persisted. "Absolutely sure that she wasn't there?"
"I--I only opened the door for a second," she said, "But I saw the bed. It hadn't been slept in."
"Just before I came down to prayers," she replied.