Just then Seecombe appeared and hovered in the passage.
“What is it, Seecombe, is dinner ready?” I asked.
“No, sir,” he replied.
“Mr. Kendall’s man, Dobson, has ridden over with a note for madam.”
My heart sank.
The wretched fellow must have stayed somewhere drinking on the road to be so late.
Now I should be caught for the business of her reading it.
How wretchedly ill-timed.
I heard Seecombe knock on her open door, and give in the letter.
“I think I will go below and wait for you in the library,” I said.
“No, don’t go,” she called,
“I’m ready dressed.
We can go down together.
Here is a letter from Mr. Kendall.
Perhaps he invites us both to Pelyn.”
Seecombe disappeared along the corridor.
I stood up and wished that I could follow him.
Suddenly I felt uneasy, nervous.
No sound came from the blue bedroom.
She must be reading the letter.
Ages seemed to pass.
At last she came out of the bedroom, and she stood in the doorway, the letter open in her hand.
She was dressed for dinner.
Perhaps it was the contrast of her skin against the mourning that made her look so white.
“What have you been doing?” she said.
Her voice sounded quite different.
Oddly strained.
“Doing?” I said.
“Nothing.
Why?”
“Don’t lie, Philip. You don’t know how.”
I stood most wretchedly before the fire, staring anywhere but in those searching accusing eyes.
“You have been to Pelyn,” she said; “you rode over there today to see your guardian.”
She was right.
I was the most hopeless useless liar. At any rate, to her.
“I may have done,” I said.
“What if I did?”
“You made him write this letter,” she said.
“No,” I said, swallowing,
“I did nothing of the sort.
He wrote it of his own accord.
There was business to discuss, and it so happened that in talking various legal matters came to the fore, and…”
“And you told him your cousin Rachel proposed giving lessons in Italian, isn’t that the truth?” she said.
I felt hot and cold and miserably ill at ease.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Surely you realized I was only joking when I told you that?” she said.
If she was joking, I thought, why then must she be so angry with me now?
“You don’t realize what you have done,” she said; “you make me feel utterly ashamed.”
She went and stood by the window, with her back to me.
“If you wish to humiliate me,” she said, “by heaven you have gone the right way about it.”