Color mounted to her brows where the yashmak couldn’t conceal it, though she ignored the question.
“And I’m sure it wasn’t your sister Evelyn.”
“Because she promised me, too. I should be frightfully hurt if I thought she—”
“Then I’ll relieve your mind by assuring you that she didn’t. But to me the curious thing is that you shouldn’t have wanted me to know.”
She ignored this, too, a furrow of perplexity deepening between her brows.
“It isn’t possible that Lady Rideover or Evelyn, without telling you in words, should have allowed you to suspect—”
“Not any more than they allowed me to suspect that I was being nursed by a houri out of paradise.”
She hastened to make a correction. “Oh, I never acted as nurse to you! It was that Miss Farley.”
“But you were at Taplow when I was there, and in and out of my room.”
The peculiar light in her eyes, partly of amazement, partly of incredulity, reminded me of a poor trapped lady I had once seen in the prisoner’s dock while a witness recounted the secrets of her life with remarkable exactness of detail.
“But you couldn’t see me!” she began, helplessly.
“And you didn’t hear me. If I went into your room, which I didn’t often do—”
I launched a theory that was purely inspiration.
“Oh, I know. If you came into my room you didn’t make a sound. You arranged that with Mabel. But haven’t you heard that the blind develop an extra sense?”
“Not as quickly as that—or with that precision.” She brightened with a new thought. “If your extra sense told you I was there, why didn’t you speak to me?”
“Suppose I said that I respected your incognita? If you didn’t want to speak to me it must have been for a reason. I couldn’t ignore that.”
A shell from the submarine struck the water somewhere near us, though all we saw was a column of white spume on the port side of the ship, while we were on the starboard.
She ignored even this. Standing erect, with her hands in the pockets of her ulster, with no feature to betray her but her eyes, she surmised, calmly, “Some of the other nurses or one of the patients must have given you a hint.”
“None of them ever pronounced your name in my hearing.”
“Then I give up guessing!” she said, with a touch of impatience.
“At what you’ve done it—at what you’re doing it—for.”