"Yes," he went on, "you owe me your sympathy now. You have given me so much that you must give me more. I have a right to it."
"Mr. Walcott!" said Lettice, raising her head quickly, "you can have no right——"
"No right to sympathy from a friend? Well, perhaps not," he answered bitterly. "I thought that, although you were a woman, you could allow me the claim I make. It is small enough, God knows! Miss Campion, forgive me for speaking so roughly. I ask most earnestly for your friendship and your sympathy; will you not give me these?"
Lettice moved onward towards the door. "Do you think that we ought to discuss our personal concerns in such a place as this?" she asked, evading the question in a thoroughly feminine manner.
"Why not? But if not here, then in another place. By the bye"—with a sudden change of manner, as they stepped into the light of day—"I have a rare book that I want to show you. Will you let me bring it to your house to-morrow morning? I think that you will be interested. May I bring it?"
"Yes," said Lettice mechanically. The change from fierce earnestness to this subdued conventionality of tone bewildered her a little.
"I will come at twelve, if that hour will suit you?"
"It will suit me very well."
And then he raised his hat and left her. Lettice, her pulses throbbing strangely, took her way back to Hammersmith. As she grew calmer, she wondered what had agitated her so much; it must have been something in his look or in his tone, for every effort to assure herself by a repetition of his words that they were mere commonplaces of conversation set her heart beating more tumultuously than ever. She walked all the way from Westminster to Brook Green without once reflecting that she might save herself that fatigue by hailing a passing omnibus.