He caught her meaning in a flash. “You didn’t want me to, then?” He stood looking at her. “I suppose I ought to have taken your silence as meaning that. But I happened to meet Mrs. Wynn, who is stopping here, and she asked me to dine with her and Charlotte, and Charlotte’s young man. They told me they’d seen you arriving this afternoon, and I couldn’t help coming up.” There was a pause between them, which Mrs. Lidcote at last surprisingly broke with the exclamation: “Ah, she _did_ recognize me, then!” “Recognize you?” He stared. “Why--” “Oh, I saw she did, though she never moved an eyelid. I saw it by Charlotte’s blush. The child has the prettiest blush. I saw that her mother wouldn’t let her speak to me.” Ide put down his hat with an impatient laugh. “Hasn’t Leila cured you of your delusions?” She looked at him intently. “Then you don’t think Margaret Wynn meant to cut me?” “I think your ideas are absurd.” She paused for a perceptible moment without taking this up; then she said, at a tangent: “I’m sailing tomorrow early. I meant to write to you--there’s the letter I’d begun.” Ide followed her gesture, and then turned his eyes back to her face. “You didn’t mean to see me, then, or even to let me know that you were going till you’d left?” “I felt it would be easier to explain to you in a letter--” “What in God’s name is there to explain?” She made no reply, and he pressed on: “It can’t be that you’re worried about Leila, for Charlotte Wynn told me she’d been there last week, and there was a big party arriving when she left: Fresbies and Gileses, and Mrs. Lorin Boulger--all the board of examiners! If Leila has passed _that_, she’s got her degree.” Mrs. Lidcote had dropped down into a corner of the sofa where she had sat during their talk of the week before. “I was stupid,” she began abruptly. “I ought to have gone to Ridgefield with Susy. I didn’t see till afterward that I was expected to.” “You were expected to?” “Yes. Oh, it wasn’t Leila’s fault. She suffered--poor darling; she was distracted. But she’d asked her party before she knew I was arriving.” “Oh, as to that--” Ide drew a deep breath of relief. “I can understand that it must have been a disappointment not to have you to herself just at first. But, after all, you were among old friends or their children: the Gileses and Fresbies--and little Charlotte Wynn.” He paused a moment before the last name, and scrutinized her hesitatingly. “Even if they came at the wrong time, you must have been glad to see them all at Leila’s.” She gave him back his look with a faint smile. “I didn’t see them.” “You didn’t see them?” “No. That is, excepting little Charlotte Wynn. That child is exquisite. We had a talk before luncheon the day I arrived. But when her mother found out that I was staying in the house she telephoned her to leave immediately, and so I didn’t see her again.” The colour rushed to Ide’s sallow face. “I don’t know where you get such ideas!”