She drank three glasses of wine during the meal.

After dinner she went to her own apartment immediately, and did not come down again that day.
On the next morning Mrs.Dinneford tried to appear cheerful and indifferent.

But her almost colorless face, pinched about the lips and nostrils, and the troubled expression that would not go out of her eyes, betrayed to Edith the intense anxiety and dread that lay beneath the surface.
Days went by, but Edith had no more signs.

Now that her mother was steadily getting back both bodily strength and mental self-poise, the veil behind which she was hiding herself, and which had been broken into rifts here and there during her sickness, grew thicker and thicker.

Mrs.
Dinneford had too much at stake not to play her cards with exceeding care.