“He thought,” said Esme with sorrowful solemnity, “that I was just as bad as I seemed.  He ought to have known me better.”

The older woman bent and laid a cheek against the sunny hair.  “And weren’t you just as bad as you seemed?”

“Worse!  Anyway, I’m afraid so,” said the confessional voice, rather muffled in tone.  “But I—­I just got led into it.  Oh, Jinny, I’m not awfully happy.”

Mrs. Willard’s head went up and she cocked an attentive ear, like an expectant robin.  “Some one outside,” said she.  “I’ll be back in a moment.  You sit there and think it over.”

Esme curled back on the divan.  A minute later she heard the curtains part at the end of the dim room, and glanced up with a smile, to face, not Jeannette Willard, but Hal Surtaine.

“You ’phoned for me, Lady Jinny,” he began:  and then, with a start, “Esme!  I—­I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Nor I to see you,” she said, with a calmness that belied her beating heart.  “Sit down, please.  I have something to tell you.  It’s what I really came to the office to say.”

“Yes?”

“About Kathleen Pierce.”

Hal frowned.  “Do you think there can be any use—­”

“Please,” she begged, with uplifted eyes of entreaty.  “She—­she didn’t tell me the truth about that interview with your reporter.  It was true; but she made me think it wasn’t.  She confessed to me, and she feels very badly.  So do I. I believed that you had deliberately made that up, about her saying that she didn’t turn back because she wanted to catch a train.  I believed, too, that the editorial was written after our—­our talk.  I’m sorry.”

Hal stood above her, looking rather stern, and a little old and worn, she thought.

“If that is an apology, it is accepted,” he said with surface politeness.

To him she was, in that moment, a light-minded woman apologizing for the petty misdeed, and paying no heed to the graver wrong that she had done him.  Jeannette Willard could have set him right in a word; could have shown him what the girl felt, unavowedly to herself but with underlying conviction, that for so great an offense no apology could suffice; nothing short of complete surrender.  But Mrs. Willard was not there to help out.  She was waiting hopefully, outside.

“And that is all?” he said, after a pause, with just a shade of contempt in his voice.

“All,” she said lightly, “unless you choose to tell me how the ‘Clarion’ is getting on.”

“As well as could be expected.  We pay high for our principles.  But thus far we’ve held to them.  You should read the paper.”

“I do.”

“To expect your approval would be too much, I suppose.”

“No.  In many ways I like it.  In fact, I think I’ll renew my subscription.”

It was innocently said, without thought of the old playful bargain between them, which had terminated with the mailing of the withered arbutus.  But to Hal it seemed merely a brazen essay in coquetry; an attempt to reconstitute the former relation, for her amusement.