“You guessed it perfectly. Now don’t put a false construction on this, for on second thoughts I realized that I was quite wrong. I was annoyed by the way Philip McAllister asked for you on the telephone this afternoon. I had the disagreeable feeling that if you had answered, he would have asked you to meet him for tea, and I said to myself, ‘Surely that child can’t be having rendezvous with Philip who is virtually Hopestill’s fiancé.’ ”

Until now she had been talking to me behind the rustling screen of the Transcript, but now she lowered it and as I earnestly denied that I had seen Philip at all except in her own drawing-room, I winced at the firm set of her jaw and the suspicious, narrowed eyes. Though what I said was true, I did not feel that I had been absolved of my guilt, but that she was reading my mind in which my sporadic infatuation with the doctor was trying in vain to flutter out of reach of her superhuman intuition. Her gaze was like a magnet that drew towards it my will-less secret. Five minutes before, I had not been conscious of my love which, at best, when I was not with him, was like the exhilaration the novice feels from drinking, not like the somnolent pleasure of the addict. But now I felt feverish and giddy. Thus, the innocent man on trial, under the skillful bombardment of the prosecution grows hot and quivers and finds his voice distant and shrill as if a subtler faculty than his conscious mind has been besieged and he is no longer sure that he did not commit the crime.

“Poor girl,” said Miss Pride, “it’s not easy for you. You’re homesick, I expect, not lovesick. I’m not up on my psychology, as Hope would say. Tell me, did you meet any interesting young people at Berthe’s today?”

I told her of Gerhardt Preis whom she had met and had not cared for. “When I was your age, I deplored race prejudice. To my dear, single-minded Papa’s chagrin, I used to seek out your Israels and Rachels, the bigger the nose the better. But at last I admitted to myself that I was just like everyone else. I didn’t get on with them . . . their aggressiveness distressed me in public and their money mania at last got the better of my idealism. Now, while I say ‘live and let live’ I must confess I sympathize with that particular of Hitler’s program. Did you meet anyone else?”