Arthur said that he understood that Marie would be out, and therefore had not proposed to pay his friends a visit that day.
"Out, is she? Ah, yes!" He smiled knowingly. "You know what she's doing better than her father does!" He was walking about the little room, looking at Arthur's pictures, photographs, and other small possessions. "Well, you'll be coming again soon, I expect?"
"I expect so, if you'll have me," said Arthur, smiling.
Mr. Sarradet took up a photograph. "That's a nice face!"
"It's my mother, Mr. Sarradet."
"Your mother, is it? Ah, well now! And she lives at——? Let me see! You did mention it."
"At Malvern—she and my sister."
"Your sister? Ah, yes! Unmarried, isn't she? Have you no other brothers or sisters?"
Under these questions—and more followed, eliciting a good deal of information about his family and its circumstances—Arthur's face gradually assumed its distinctively patient expression. The patience was very closely akin to endurance—in fact, to boredom. Why did the fussy old fellow worry him like that? Instinctively he hardened himself against Sarradet—against Sarradet's implied assertion of a right to ask him all these questions. Perhaps he knew that this resentment was not very reasonable. He felt it, none the less. To put him in any way to the question, to a test or a trial, was so entirely contrary to what had been Marie's way.
"And you're practising at the Bar, Mr. Lisle, eh?"