"I detest the fellow!" he said. "He's a beastly outsider!"
He dared not look at her. He held his breath, waiting for the storm to break, but if he had lost his self-control she kept hers admirably.
"Really," she said. Her voice was a little breathless, but quite calm. "What does a man mean when he calls another man--such a name?"
Her face was quite colourless, even to the lips, and her hands were clenched in the shabbiness of the cheap little muff she carried.
"I ought not to have said that, just because he's not the sort of man I care about," he said stammeringly. "He's quite all right--it all depends from what point of view you regard him. I hope you will forget that I said that, Miss Shepstone. It--it was unpardonable."
"It's a matter of complete indifference to me what you say about--Mr. Ashton," she told him.
She stopped. They had been walking along together.
Micky flushed up to his eyes; he knew this was a dismissal.
"I was coming along to see June," he said. "I hoped you would allow me to walk along with you--if I am not intruding."
Esther forced a smile, but her lips felt stiff.
"Oh, but I am not going back," she said. Her voice sounded as if it were cut in ice. "So I won't detain you. Good-bye."
She turned and left him, walking quickly away again in the direction from which she had just come.
Her eyes were smarting with tears that had to be restrained.
"How dare he--oh, how dare he?" she asked herself passionately. "What does he know about Raymond?"
She could not trust herself to go back home. She walked about in the cold till she was tired out. She wanted to be sure that Micky would have left Elphinstone Road before she got there. She wondered if June knew the Ashtons too. She probably did, as Micky Mellowes knew them. They were both of Raymond's own world, these two. It was only she, who loved him best, who was outside the magic circle of his friends.
It was nearly supper time when she got in. She paused for a moment in the hall and looked anxiously at the rows of coats and hats hanging there. She thought she would know Micky's if she saw them there. She forgot that he might have taken them up to June's room. She turned away with a little sigh.
At the foot of the stairs she met young Harley. He coloured sensitively when he saw her and stood aside for her to pass.