“Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at the station?” Verrian demanded, in a burst of rage, “and left us to get here the best way we could?”

Bushwick grinned.  “She supposed there were other carriages, and when she found there weren’t she hurried the victoria back for you.”

“You think she believes all that?  I’m glad she has the decency to be ashamed of her behavior.”

“I’m not defending her.  Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself.”

The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it.  After the first few whiffs he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said, “Who was your fair friend?”

If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul.  “This afternoon?” Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, “That was she.”  Then he went on, wrathfully:  “She’s a girl who has to make her living, and she’s doing it in a new way that she’s invented for herself.  She has supposed that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a money consideration.  She’s not a guest in the house, and she won’t take herself on a society basis at all.  I don’t know what her history is, and I don’t care.  She’s a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of the South that comes North and tries to make its living.  It’s all inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much of the case, and if you’re knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick, I want you to get it straight.  That’s why I’m talking of it, and not because I think you’ve any right to know anything about it.”

“Thank you,” Bushwick returned, unruffled.  “It’s about what Miss Macroyd told me.  That’s the reason I don’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”

Verrian did not notice him.  He found it more important to say:  “She’s so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she wouldn’t have wished, in Mrs. Westangle’s interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is going on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it, that’s her affair.”

“She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would; and she only told it to Miss Macroyd this afternoon on compulsion, after Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle had to account for the young lady’s presence there in your company.  Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I assure you, my dear fellow, the matter hasn’t gone any further.”

“Oh, it’s quite indifferent to me,” Verrian retorted.  “I’m nothing but a dispassionate witness of the situation.”

“Of course,” Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even an unreasonable grudge could hardly resist it, “If you call it dispassionate.”