Mrs. Ware turned a beaming face. "Can't you guess, darling? Oh, Austin,
there's no living woman whom I would sooner call my daughter. You've
made me so happy."
The facile tears came, and she sat down and dried them on her little
wisp of handkerchief.
"I thought it for the best to tell your mother, Austin," said Katherine,
somewhat apologetically. "We were speaking of you--and--I couldn't
keep it back."
Viviette, white-lipped and dazed, looked at Austin, Katherine, and Dick
in turns. She said, in the high-pitched voice, to Austin:
"Have you asked Katherine to marry you?"
"Yes," he replied, not quite so confidently, and avoiding her
glance--"and she has done me the honour of accepting me."
Katherine held out a conciliatory hand to Viviette. "Won't you
congratulate me, dear?"
"And Austin, too," said Mrs. Ware.
But Viviette lost control of herself. "I'll congratulate nobody," she
cried shrilly. She burned with a sense of intolerable outrage. Only a
few hours before she had been befooled into believing herself to be the
mistress of the destinies of two men.
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