“Ah, I don’t understand you!”
She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing it. “You don’t understand because you haven’t yet guessed how you’ve changed things for me: oh, from the first—long before I knew all you’d done.”
“All I’d done?”
“Yes. I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of me—that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person. It seems they had even refused to meet me at dinner. I found that out afterward; and how you’d made your mother go with you to the van der Luydens’; and how you’d insisted on announcing your engagement at the Beaufort ball, so that I might have two families to stand by me instead of one—”
At that he broke into a laugh.
“Just imagine,” she said, “how stupid and unobservant I was! I knew nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day. New York simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home. And I was so happy at being among my