It was sometime after ten when Petra let herself softly in at the front door. The library door had been left open after Lewis’ interruption of the reading and she heard voices. Dick’s. Her father’s. If Lewis had happened to speak as she crossed the hall, she would never have gone on and in. She would have stolen away to bed and sent a maid to tell Clare she was at home. It was too late to retreat when she saw Lewis. Her face hardened as she came forward. So Clare had won. They had not known at the office—she and Miss Frazier—that Doctor Pryne had even returned, and yet here he was the first hour he was back, sitting beside her stepmother, helping her wind up a ball of yarn. But it was stupid to be so surprised. Hadn’t she known ever since Saturday evening that Clare had Doctor Pryne in tow! If it were not so, he would never have betrayed Petra’s confidences to her as he had done.
Clare entranced every one, of course,—except Petra herself. But Saturday afternoon, when Doctor Pryne had walked with Petra across to the guest-house piazza and sat there, listening to the bobolink, and Petra had been moved to be herself with him, and even to talk about Teresa, she had thought that Doctor Pryne would be the one exception to the general rule. He would be her friend—Petra’s—not Clare’s. _He would see through Clare._ He belonged to herself and Teresa. That meeting, long ago in the Cambridge apartment, had made him belong. Or rather they had been deceived—and thought so. Where had the idea come from, anyway? Teresa had been as illusioned as Petra herself. And when he held her chair for her at Clare’s tea table—and even more, while she sat silent beside him, and could not make herself eat or drink because it was so wonderful that he had come at last—Petra had _known_ that he understood her and was close to her in some indefinable but real way. She had known but she had known a lie. It was an illusion brought away out of childhood; and she had been enticed from her secret fastness by it, the fastness where she hid from Clare and all of the life here at Green Doors.
Doctor Pryne was holding a chair for her at this minute as he had held the chair under the elm. The same look was on his face. If she did not watch out, she would be betrayed by it into sincerity again, into being simply herself.