"Good gracious. Miss Deane, whatever do you mean?"
Lady Dudgeon was surprised for the moment out of her assumed equability.
"To put the case in plain language, and it will perhaps be best to do so," said Olive, "has your ladyship never had reason to suspect that Miss Lloyd and Mr. Pomeroy were engaged to each other?"
"Impossible! such a thing is utterly impossible!" was Lady Dudgeon's emphatic reply. "I know Miss Lloyd too well to believe anything of the kind. For once, Miss Deane, your surmises have led you altogether astray."
"Possibly so; I hope so," said Olive, resignedly.
There was an awkward silence. Her ladyship fidgeted, but said nothing. Singular to say, she seemed far more put out by what Olive had just said to her than by the far more important disclosure that had been made to her half an hour previously.
"You--you mentioned some circumstance," she said at last, not without a touch of irritation. She felt as though Olive were doing her a personal injury.
"Yes; a little circumstance of which I was the accidental witness. But probably your ladyship will not think it worth while to listen to it."
"Probably it is not worth listening to, but still there can be no harm in your telling me."
"One evening, some two or three weeks before my cousin was taken ill," began Olive, "I was sitting in the bow-window of the back drawing-room. The curtains were partly drawn, and when Miss Lloyd came into the room she did not see me. She sat down at the piano and began to play: and as there was no third person present, I saw no reason for making my presence known. But after a time Mr. Pomeroy came in. He had just returned from a journey, and was evidently in search of Miss Lloyd. He hurried up to her, and, before I had time to say a word, he had folded her in his arms. Then he called her his darling, and kissed her several times."
"How dreadful--how very dreadful!" exclaimed Lady Dudgeon, with a sort of terror.
"And then----Miss Lloyd kissed him back."
Lady Dudgeon could only put down her cup of chocolate and groan.
In saying that Eleanor kissed Gerald back, Olive told a lie, a weakness that she was never guilty of unless she had some particular end to serve.
"And do you really mean to affirm, Miss Deane, that you saw these--these shocking things with your own eyes?" Lady Dudgeon contrived to say at last.