Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/126

 except for the last three words "when he appeared." It was true that he had seemed calm then. If not, she knew she would have perjured herself and become a false witness rather than bring a new trouble worse than the first upon him. Terry Ricardo, whose father had been half Italian, half English, had had a wholly American mother, and she was loyal in every beat of her blood, but she could not help remembering several things. She remembered how Ian had stammered when he spoke of parting from his wife in the woods. Not only had he betrayed painful embarrassment, but a deep distress. She had then attributed it to some kind of late-springing remorse for the past, though it had seemed intense beyond all reason, but now — why, still she attributed it to that!

"Oh, God, Terry!" he had cried to her; and she had hushed him back to conventionality. If only she could stop seeing his eyes as they had looked then, hearing his voice as it had sounded then!

But her thoughts would escape control and buzz round the forbidden subject as moths rush to the flame of a lighted candle.

"How did Sir Ian explain his wife's absence?"

This was a little harder, but Terry did not flinch.

"I believe he said that she wanted to linger in the woods for a little while, but he thought she wouldn't be long; and I had the impression that he fancied she