CHAPTER XVIIIWell, she had burned her boats, and she didn’t care. Miss Silver must be blind, deaf, and idiotic if she didn’t tumble to the fact that Bill Waring was the centre of things as far as Ray Fortescue was concerned, and she wasn’t reckoning on Miss Silver being anything of the kind. By just what imperceptible degree she was passing, or had passed, from wondering why Lady Dryden had sent her on such an apparently futile errand to an almost desperate anxiety that Miss Silver should be induced to come down to Vineyards, she could not have said. The originals of all those photographs smiling from their old-fashioned frames could have told her that they too had travelled the same way.
Ray sat there and wondered at herself. She had cried in front of a woman whom she had never seen befo
