They faced each other for another moment, and into Mrs. Romayne’s eyes there crept a sick despair strangely incongruous with the surface appearance of the position. Then she seemed to recover herself as if with a tremendous effort of will. She drew herself up, bowed her head with grave dignity, and moved to leave the room. He held the door open for her with an absolutely expressionless countenance. She passed down the hall to where the servant was waiting at the door, went out, and got into her carriage alone.
Loring stood at the foot of the stairs watching her, and then turned with a cruel contentment in his eyes, and went upstairs again to the drawing-room.
The two elder ladies were sitting with their heads very close together, as he opened the drawing-room door, evidently deep in some question of domestic importance. And standing by a conservatory window at the other end of the room, a rather bored-looking figure in its solitary girlishness, was Maud Pomeroy. The occasion being, as has been said, something of an anomaly, conventions were not so strict as usual. Lady Bracondale just glanced up with a vague smile as Loring reappeared, and then became absorbed in conversation as he strolled across to Maud Pomeroy. She looked up at him with a faint smile.
He signified a careless assent, and then said:
“You are looking rather bored, do you know, Miss Pomeroy? Suppose we go and look at the flowers until we’re wanted?”
She hesitated a moment, and then moved idly into the conservatory, looking back at Loring with a smile as he followed her.
“I was a little bored,” she confessed. “It is very kind of you to come and amuse me.”
For the next moment or two Loring could hardly be said to prove himself very amusing. He sauntered round the little conservatory at his companion’s side, his eyes fixed keenly upon her impassive profile with something very calculating in their depths. Miss Pomeroy also was apparently absorbed in thought, and did not notice his silence.
“You are a great friend of the Romaynes, are you not?” she said at last, in her thin, even, very “proper” tones.
“Well,” he said, “that’s not a question that it’s particularly easy for me to answer, to-day. I have been on fairly intimate terms with them, as you know. But do you know what that kind of thing sometimes leads to?”