“Not again to see him,” she now answered, “if you tell me the picture’s safe? Yes, I recognise that I was ready—as well as how scornfully little you then were!”
“Never mind what I then was—the question’s of what I actually am, since I close with you on it The picture’s therefore as safe as you please,” Lord Theign pursued, “if you’ll do what you just now engaged to.”
“I engaged to do nothing,” she replied after a pause; and the face she turned to him had grown suddenly tragic. “I’ve no word to take back, for none passed between us; but I won’t do what I mentioned and what you at once laughed at Because,” she finished, “the case is different.”
“Different?” he almost shouted—“how, different?”
She didn’t look at him for it, but she was none the less strongly distinct “He has been here—and that has done it He knows,” she admirably emphasised.
“Knows what I think of him, no doubt—for a brazen young prevaricator! But what else?”
She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. “What he will have seen—that I feel we’re too good friends.”
“Then your denial of it’s false,” her father fairly thundered—“and you are infatuated?”
It made her the more quiet. “I like him very much.”
“So that your row about the picture,” he demanded with passion, “has been all a blind?” And then as her quietness still held her: “And his a blind as much—to help him to get at you?”