In The Rebound

On the stairs he bent to scan her blushing countenance.

"How am I to punish you for your naughty distrust of my friendship
and common sense? I have been too busy all day to spare a minute for
social pleasure. I dined at two o'clock, having an appointment at
three, returned at half-past five, and was just coming down to your
parlor to look you up. Another bit of unimportant news, with which I
should not have annoyed you if you had not merited a little vexation
by your preposterous fancies, is, that, instead of taking an early
train to Philadelphia, I have to-day entered into engagements that
will oblige me to prolong my stay in this place until the first of
February."

He looked bright and cheerful, ready for sport or badinage. Rosa
caught herself wondering many times during that evening, and the
succeeding days of the three weeks they passed under the same roof,
if she had dreamed of--not beheld with her bodily optics--that one
stormy burst of passion which had been his farewell to the hope of a
final reconciliation with Mabel Aylett.

He never spoke of her again, or referred, in the most distant
manner, to his visit at Ridgeley. The omission was an agreeable one
to Rosa for several reasons. Silence, she believed, was to oblivion
as a means to an end. Judging from herself, she adopted the theory
that people were apt to forget what they never talked of themselves,
nor heard mentioned by others. Furthermore, she was relieved from
the necessity of concocting diplomatic evasions, dexterously
skirting the truth, to say nothing of plump falsehoods. These last
cost her conscience some unpleasant twinges. To avoid narrating in
full what had happened was a work of art. A downright lie was a
stroke of heavy business, unsuited to her airy genius--and when the
Aylett-Chilton complication was upon the tapis, it was difficult to
avoid undertaking such.