“I’ve been under some obligations to him; it would be difficult to refuse. We’re good friends, but—I didn’t want him here. It wouldn’t be—convenient.” Now he was looking furtive and rather embarrassed, as if he were uncertain how much truth and how much lie he had better administer to me.
“I saw him in Paris,” I remarked, “the other day, and from what he said it seemed that he’d made very good friends both with you and with your wife.”
He smiled; having no such shame as ordinary mortals have, he accepted exposure easily. He relapsed into the truth quite gracefully. “I don’t know how the devil Lucinda feels about him,” he confessed. “I wish he wouldn’t come at all, but I can’t help that. At all events he needn’t be in the house with us now!”
“Have you any reason to suppose she doesn’t like him?” I asked.
His restlessness returned, and with it his dreary look. He got up and began to wander about the long room, fingering furniture and ornaments, then drifting back to me at the window, and the next moment away again. Suddenly, from the other end of the room, he came out with, “What have they told between them? Godfrey at Paris, and Lucinda here to-day?”
“Well, pretty nearly everything, I fancy. If you mean the money and Nina Dundrannan, and so forth. He described that meeting at Cimiez, for example.”
“Yes, they’ve told you everything—everything that matters. Well, what do you think?”
“If we’re to be friends, I’d sooner not offer an opinion.”
He flashed out at me. “There’s your code—your damned code! Didn’t I learn it in England? Didn’t I have it literally drubbed into me—thrashed into me—at school? And you keep it even when you love a woman!”
“H’m! Not always in that case, I’m afraid, Arsenio.”