“Don’t you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent,” she said, not unsympathetically.  “She’s in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she knows it now, if she didn’t before.”  And it was with this arrow rankling in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the porch.

XXII

A BORROWED CONSCIENCE

The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the vine-covered trellis.

Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music—­Penelope’s music—­and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.

It was Elinor’s chance for free speech with Kent—­the opportunity she had craved.  But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place.  Under other conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling.  None the less, he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.

“What is the matter with us this evening?” he queried.  “We have been sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and Loring side-tracked us.  I haven’t been doing anything I am ashamed of; have you?”

“Yes,” she confessed, looking away from him.

“What is it?”

“I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is good reason to believe he didn’t want to come.”

“What makes you think he didn’t want to come?”

“Why—­I don’t know; did he?” She had turned upon him swiftly with an outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings in time past—­the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and instant and sympathetic apprehension.

“You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn’t glad enough to give,” he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.

“Is that saying very much—­or very little?”

“Very little, indeed.  But it is only your askings that have been lacking—­not his good will.”

“That was said like the David Kent I used to know.  Are you really quite the same?”

“I hope not,” he protested gravely.  “People used to say of me that I matured late, and year by year as I look back I can see that it was a true saying.  I have done some desperately boyish things since I was a man grown; things that make me tingle when I recall them.”

“Like wasting a whole summer exploring Mount Croydon with a—­a somebody who did not mature late?”

“No; I wasn’t counting that among my lapses.  An older man than I ever hope to be might find excuses for the Croydon summer.  I meant in other ways.  For one thing, I have craved success as I think few men have ever craved it; and yet my plowings in that field have been ill-timed and boyish to a degree.”