“Sometimes. Very seldom. I tell you, Mr. O’Brien, there is no rhyme or reason to your suspicions in that direction.”
“Even so, Miss Frazier, I beg you to adjure Miss Kate here to secrecy. She should, on no condition, tell Miss Elsie one word she has heard.”
Miss Frazier nodded, glancing at Kate. Kate’s return look carried her promise. “I shall hope for something more definite when next I hear from you, Mr. O’Brien. Good afternoon. Home, Timothy.”
Mr. O’Brien stood on the curb while the big car pulled out. There was a troubled, displeased expression on his face, Kate thought. She knew that he resented very much the interview not having been more private.
“Is he a detective?” she asked her aunt curiously.
“Yes, a private detective, and a very good one. But perhaps he is right, Kate, and you had better forget all about him. If he is doing the job I suppose he has a right to do it in his own way.”
A private detective! And what had a detective to suspect of Elsie! But Kate took her aunt’s hint and asked no more questions.
Their way home took them by the Green Shutter Tea Room, a quaint little place built by a stream in a grove of maples. The tables were set out under the trees. Aunt Katherine suggested that they stop. And when they were seated opposite each other at a little round green table, their order given, they smiled at each other contentedly, like friends of long standing.
“You haven’t told me a word about how you like the orchard house!” Aunt Katherine said. “Did you go all over it? The study is really the nicest room. Did you like that? And did you see your mother’s old playroom?”
Kate hesitated to confess to her aunt that she had not been near the orchard house. It might involve Elsie too much. She remembered Elsie’s plea last night. So she hesitated, feeling her cheeks redden. But after an instant she said, “I think I shall save it for a day when there isn’t so much to do. It’s a darling house, but I haven’t been in.”
“After the party on Thursday I am hoping that all your days here will be full of things to do, yours and Elsie’s, too. She will begin to have the life of other girls again. For myself I have hardly cared a bit. I had rather grown away from my old friends, anyway, and larger interests, or at least more impersonal interests, have been absorbing me of late years. But now I’m pocketing my pride for Elsie’s sake, and going more than halfway toward reconciliations.... Madame Pearl, the woman to whom I am sending you to-morrow for frocks, is an artist in her way. You two girls must choose dresses that not only become yourselves but go well together.”