Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/123

 to keep them at the price of a cowardly civility to a person he detested. Now after all these years, evidently, it had seemed to Major Smedley that his time had come at last to scratch in good earnest. Nothing on earth would delight such a creature more than a chance to throw suspicion on Sir Ian Hereward through Miss Ricardo.

But Miss Ricardo determined that he should not succeed. She would not let Ian be hurt through her. No matter what she might have to say, she would not hurt Ian.

The calmness that blew like a cooling breeze upon the heat of her excitement was strange to Terry, but she was thankful for it.

After a scarcely perceptible pause, she said in response to the coroner's question: "I do not think that Captain Hereward ever wished to marry me." And almost she would have been glad if Ian had been there to hear her answer. "Within three months after our first meeting," she went on, without waiting for another question to come, "he had fallen desperately in love with my friend Miss Latham, and was engaged to her."

As she spoke, she allowed her eyes to move about the room and rest for an instant on Major Smedley's face. She hoped that she could read disappointment upon it, and a catty annoyance that the question had been put in a way to give her this chance of wriggling