'Is it true you were seen talking in the park to that girl Miss
Turnbull, on Sunday?'
'If you say I was seen, I was. You could not know I talk to her unless
I was seen. You could not know by wireless.'
'Don't talk nonsense, Paul,' she answered sharply. 'The point isn't that you were seen, but that you did it.'
'Who did it? Me? I didn't do anything.'
'I don't think it's fair to me, I must say; it hurt my feelings that you should meet Amy Turnbull in the park and talk to her.'
'But what could I say? It is ver' difficul. I walk through the park; she walk through it with another lady. She speak to me. She say: Ah, dear Mr La France, what pleasure to see you! I ask you, Lady Everard, could I, a foreigner, not even naturalised here, could I order her out of the park? Could I scream out to her: Go out, do not walk in ze Hyde Park! Lady Everard do not like you! I have no authority to say that. I am not responsible for the persons that walk in their own park in their own country. She might answer me to go to the devil! She might say to me: What, Lady Everard not like me, so I am not allowed in the park? What that got to do with it? In a case like this, chère madame, I have no legal power.'
She laughed forgivingly and said:
'Ah, well, one mustn't be too exacting!' and as she showed some signs of a desire to pat his hair he rose, sat down to the piano, greatly to her disappointment, and filled up the rest of the time by improvising (from memory). It was a little fatiguing, as she thought it her duty to keep up an expression of acute rapture during the whole of the performance, which lasted at least three-quarters of an hour.
CHAPTER XXIV
Miss Bennett