“Yes; she has pupils, or she would have been with us.”
“She is well, I trust?”
“Very well. We shall see you at tea to-morrow?” Claire laid a gently urgent hand upon his arm. “I have been practising the Gluck. I think you will be pleased with it. You will come?”
“With great pleasure, as always,” said the Frenchman, but still with something of unwonted gravity beneath his apparent ease.
They parted, and Claire and Damier walked on.
“He was shocked,” said Claire, mildly.
Monsieur Daunay might or might not be shocked, but Damier felt that he himself was, more so than he could quite account for. He fixed upon that wholly unnecessary half-untruth of hers; he could not let it pass.
“We have often come here; your mother has only once come with us,” he said, with the effect of cold shyness that his displeasure usually took; it always required an effort of distinct courage on Eustace Damier’s part to express displeasure.
“There was no necessity for him to know that,” she returned, adding, with a laugh: “Now I have shocked both of you—he in his convenances, you in your English veracity. I don’t mind fibbing in the least, I must tell you.”