She pursued, as if she had not heard him: “Oh, and I saw Mary Giles for a minute too. Susy Suffern brought her up to my room the last evening, after dinner, when all the others were at bridge. She meant it kindly--but it wasn’t much use.” “But what were you doing in your room in the evening after dinner?” “Why, you see, when I found out my mistake in coming,--how embarrassing it was for Leila, I mean--I simply told her I was very tired, and preferred to stay upstairs till the party was over.” Ide, with a groan, struck his hand against the arm of his chair. “I wonder how much of all this you simply imagined!” “I didn’t imagine the fact of Harriet Fresbie’s not even asking if she might see me when she knew I was in the house. Nor of Mary Giles’s getting Susy, at the eleventh hour, to smuggle her up to my room when the others wouldn’t know where she’d gone; nor poor Leila’s ghastly fear lest Mrs. Lorin Boulger, for whom the party was given, should guess I was in the house, and prevent her husband’s giving Wilbour the second secretaryship because she’d been obliged to spend a night under the same roof with his mother-in-law!” Ide continued to drum on his chair-arm with exasperated fingers. “You don’t _know_ that any of the acts you describe are due to the causes you suppose.” Mrs. Lidcote paused before replying, as if honestly trying to measure the weight of this argument. Then she said in a low tone: “I know that Leila was in an agony lest I should come down to dinner the first night. And it was for me she was afraid, not for herself. Leila is never afraid for herself.” “But the conclusions you draw are simply preposterous. There are narrow-minded women everywhere, but the women who were at Leila’s knew perfectly well that their going there would give her a sort of social sanction, and if they were willing that she should have it, why on earth should they want to withhold it from you?” “That’s what I told myself a week ago, in this very room, after my first talk with Susy Suffern.” She lifted a misty smile to his anxious eyes. “That’s why I listened to what you said to me the same evening, and why your arguments half convinced me, and made me think that what had been possible for Leila might not be impossible for me. If the new dispensation had come, why not for me as well as for the others? I can’t tell you the flight my imagination took!” Franklin Ide rose from his seat and crossed the room to a chair near her sofa-corner. “All I cared about was that it seemed--for the moment--to be carrying you toward me,” he said.