At the sound of some one coming Helen had risen to her feet and pulled herself together with the quick pluck of her sex. But she was still too overwrought to grasp entirely the strangeness of her friend’s behavior. Mrs. Hilary was dumfounded. She had thought Helen in London. She had crept into the house through a side door, come through the halls secretly and as silently as such shoes and so much silk and many draperies could, meeting no one and hoping neither to be seen nor heard. Her errand was particularly private. She had not been surprised to find the library door unlocked, for she had not been deeper in the house than the drawing-room since Mr. Bransby’s death. She and Mrs. Leavitt were far from intimate. And Mrs. Hilary had not heard of the taboo Helen had placed on the father’s room. She was dumfounded to find Helen here, and bitterly disappointed. But she noticed little amiss with the girl. Each was too agitated to realize the agitation of the other.
Helen pulled herself together and waited, Angela pulled herself together and gushed; each with the woman’s shrewd instinct to appear natural and much as usual.
Angela supplemented her cry of dismay with an even shriller cry of enthusiastic delight.
“My dearest Helen! How perfectly lovely!”
“This is a surprise,” Helen said more quietly. Of the two she was the less surprised and far the more pleased.
“You didn’t expect to see me?” What had brought Angela rushing into this room, then?
Mrs. Hilary saw her blunder as soon as she made it, even while she was making it almost. She was greatly confused—a thing that did not often befall Angela Hilary. She and embarrassment rarely met.
“No,” she stammered. “No—I—uh—yes, yes, I came over to——” She was utterly at a loss now. “Well,” she went on desperately, “I happened to be passing——” She broke off suddenly, looking anxiously at the window, and then looked away from it pointedly, and hurried on with, “I came to see if, by any chance, it was you Margaret McIntyre caught a glimpse of in the grounds yesterday. But—I—I didn’t see you when I came in here. It’s so dark here, after the hall. When did you come? Are you going to stay long?”
“I came suddenly—on an impulse—to find something. I may stay. I may go back to-morrow. I don’t know. But I haven’t unpacked much.”