eBooks Base 2000

To few women of your age, or indeed of any age, is
Fortune so indulgent a fairy godmother as that!"
Astonished and slightly resentful at the sharpness of her guest's
unprovoked onslaught, Damaris had dropped the little bunch of trinkets
and backed into her corner of the sofa.
"Colonel Carteret has gone," she said coldly, rather irrelevantly, the
statement drawn from her by a vague instinct of self-defence.
"Gone!" Henrietta echoed, with equal irrelevance. For she was singularly
discomposed.
"Yes, he started for England last night. But you must know that already,
Henrietta. He wrote to you--he told me so himself."
But having once committed herself by use of a word implying ignorance,
Mrs. Frayling could hardly do otherwise than continue the deception.
Explanation would be too awkward a business. The chances of detection,
moreover, were infinitesimal. There were things she meant to say which
would sound far more unstudied and obvious could she keep up the fiction
of ignorance. This, quickly realizing, she again and more flagrantly
fibbed.


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