"But what--?" she hesitated, knowing that the rest of her sentence must be obvious, yet gaining time to put the matter together--fit it to the whole from its separate parts. This was the girl whom she had met that night in Jack's room--the girl he had called a lady. They were still acquainted, still friends--greater friends than ever, since he had brought her down with him to Apsley. Were they married? Married secretly? She was a thousand times better dressed than she had been before. The thought tasted bitter. She swallowed the possibility of it with undeniable courage. "Have you come down here with my brother?" she asked, still in assumed bewilderment. "Yes," replied Sally. "We--we came down in a taxi-cab." "But he never said he was bringing any one. He wrote. I--I thought he was going to be alone." Nothing could be said to this. To apologize for her presence there would be ridiculous. Sally said nothing. "Well," Mrs. Durlacher smiled, brushing away her surprise with that half-breath of laughter which throws a thin wrapping of amusement about a wealth of contemptuous resignation. "I'm afraid we haven't got much of a lunch to offer you. I expect you'll be very discontented with the slight fare I have provided for Jack and myself. He ought to have told me. Do come into the room, won't you? Wouldn't you like to take off your coat?" So, with that ease of apparent hospitality, she made her guest as uncomfortable as possible, a glutton for the slightest sign of embarrassment from Sally. Her gluttony was well served. The poor child pitiably looked once through the door, straining eager ears for the sound of Traill's footsteps; then she closed it and came to the fireplace, taking the first chair that offered. The sense that she had fallen into a trap, notwithstanding all the perfect simulation of Mrs. Durlacher's apparently genuine surprise, swept chillingly through her blood. When once she became conscious again of her bodily existence, felt the pulses throbbing in her forehead, and knew that her heart was beating like the muffled rattling of a kettledrum, she shuddered. Traill, she knew, had nothing to do with it. If that thought, with the force of conviction behind it, had entered her mind, she would have fled; driven with the curling lash of fear--fear of life itself, fear of everything. But she did not even contemplate it. It was the woman her instinct mistrusted. She had realized her an enemy before; now, in the purring tones of her tardy welcome, she recognized in her an enemy whose aggressiveness is active, brought into definite play.