The door opened, and Mrs. Hardacre appeared on the threshold. Connie bent forward and whispered quickly into Norma's ear:
“One would think you were afraid to believe in Jimmie.”
She swung round, flushed, femininely excited at having seized the unfair moment for dealing a stab.
“I hope I _have_ made her feel,” she thought, as she fluttered forward to greet Mrs. Hardacre.
She succeeded perhaps beyond her hope. A sharp glance showed her Norma still staring out of window, but staring now with an odd look of fear and pain. Her kind heart repented.
“Forgive me if I hurt you,” she said on their way downstairs to lunch.
“What does it matter?” Norma answered by way of pardon.
But the shrewd thrust mattered exceedingly. After Connie had gone, the wound ached, and Norma found that her boast of having benumbed herself was a vain word. In the night she lay awake, frightened at the reaction that was taking place. Theodore Weever had shaken her more than she had realised. Connie Deering proclaimed the same faith. She felt that she too would have to accept it--against argument, against reason, against fact. She would have to accept it wholly, implicitly; and she dreaded the act of faith. Her marriage with Morland was fixed for that day week, and she was agonisingly aware that she loved another man with all her heart.
The next day she received a hurried note from Connie Deering:
_“Do come in for half an hour for tea on Sunday. I have a beautiful wedding-present to show you which I hope you'll like, as great pains have been spent over it. And I want to have a last little chat with you.”_
She promised unreflectingly, seeing no snare. But as she walked to Bryanston Square on Sunday afternoon, more of a presentiment, a foreboding of evil, than a suspicion fixed itself upon her mind, and she wished she had not agreed to come. She was shown into the drawing-room, and there, beside a gilt-framed picture over which a cloth was thrown, with her great brown eyes meeting her defiantly, stood Aline.
THUS had Aline, her heart hot for battle in Jimmie's cause, contrived with Connie Deering as subsidiary conspirator. She had lain awake most of the night, thinking of the approaching interview, composing speeches, elaborating arguments, defining her attitude. Her plan of campaign was based on the assumption of immediate hostilities. She had pictured a scornful lady moved to sudden anger at seeing herself trapped, and haughtily refusing to discuss overtures of peace. It was to be war from the first, until she had brought her adversary low; and when the door-handle rattled and the door opened to admit Norma, every nerve in her young body grew tense, and her heart beat like the clapper of a bell.