The proposed visit was not to Wingfield’s taste. Wayne had distinctly told him that Mrs. Craighill was in Boston with her husband, and in the circumstances for him to call at the house with Walsh, of all men, would be an event whose implication would not be wasted on a man of Wayne Craighill’s sharp perception. He was averse to going; the very idea was repugnant; but Walsh clearly wished his company and he finally agreed to go. “Very well, I’ll arrange the transportation”; and Walsh dismissed him with an injunction not to break his neck on the office steps. CHAPTER XX EVENING AT THE CRAIGHILLS’ Mrs. Craighill had not relaxed her severity toward Wayne when, with Jean between them, they sat down to dinner. She continued, however, her protecting attitude toward the girl, whom she had installed in the best of the guest chambers adjoining her own room. Any doubts that had crossed her mind as to the extent of Wayne’s knowledge of the young woman had been dispelled by Jean herself. She had sought eagerly for any basis for suspicions, but Miss Morley was apparently all that she pretended to be; and Wayne’s own manner at the table set the seal of truth upon his protestations of merest acquaintance as uttered at the club-house. The girl interested Wayne and it was, Mrs. Craighill divined, the interest of novelty; she was of an order of woman that had not heretofore attracted his attention. And seeing his absorption, noting the pains he took to be entertaining, Mrs. Craighill’s glances in his direction gained nothing in amiability. He imagined that she wished to punish him for having been caught in the act of kissing her; and his acceptance of the situation, and his cool appropriation of the girl whom she had brought home merely for the purpose of placation, added to the blackness of his offenses. The talk, as led by Wayne, fell into lines that served to minimize Mrs. Craighill’s importance in the trio. She did not care about magazine illustration, or know very much about Claude Monet; and Miss Morley’s ignorance of grand opera, and her naïve preferences in the music she did know called for nothing but occasional smiles of polite indulgence from Mrs. Craighill. Wayne was making far too much of the girl; it was unnecessary and unbecoming. Her poverty, proclaimed in her shabby clothing, her lack of ease, her deficiencies in a hundred other trifling ways irritated Mrs. Craighill. But if the girl did not know how to manage her artichoke she was not dull. When she became aware of her hostess’s silence she made a point of including her in the talk.