Chapter 27

XXVII

SUSY and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided
from each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with
tattered school-books.

In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children
from their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any
moment Geordie's imperious cries might summon his slave up to
the nursery. In the scant time allotted them, the two sat, and
visibly wondered what to say.

Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with
its piano laden with tattered music, the children's toys
littering the lame sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled
butterflies flanking the cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned
to Susy and asked simply: "Why on earth are you here?"

She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood
the impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her
secret longing to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick
had taken definite steps for his release. In dread lest
Strefford should have heard of this, and should announce it to
her, coupling it with the news of Nick's projected marriage, and
lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should lose her
self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she
tried to make indifferent: "The 'proceedings,' or whatever the
lawyers call them, have begun. While they're going on I like to
stay quite by myself .... I don't know why ...."

Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. "Ah," he
murmured; and his lips were twisted into their old mocking
smile. "Speaking of proceedings," he went on carelessly, "what
stage have Ellie's reached, I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn
and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully together to-day at
Larue's."

The blood rushed to Susy's forehead. She remembered her tragic
evening with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and
thought to herself. "In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I ....

Aloud she said: "I can't imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever
want to see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all
places!"

Strefford continued to smile. "My dear, you're incorrigibly
old-fashioned. Why should two people who've done each other the
best turn they could by getting out of each other's way at the
right moment behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It's too
absurd; the humbug's too flagrant. Whatever our generation has
failed to do, it's got rid of humbug; and that's enough to
immortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie never liked each
other better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago, they'd have
been afraid to confess it; but why shouldn't they now?"

Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the
ache of the