"Well, I think I should be rather hard to please if I found Nutley dull," he said gaily. "But if you do, why do you stay?"
"Perpetual amusement isn't in a companion's contract, Mr. Harry. Besides, I'm fond of Vivien. I should be sorry to leave her before the natural end of my stay comes."
"The natural end?"
"Oh, I think you understand that." She smiled with a good-humoured scorn at his homage to pretence.
"Well, of course, girls do marry. It's been known to happen," said Harry, neither "cornered" nor embarrassed. "But perhaps"—he glanced at her, wondering whether to risk a snub. His charm, his gift of gay impudence, had so often stood him in stead and won him a liberty that a heavy-handed man could not hope to be allowed; he was not much afraid—"Perhaps you'd be asked to stay on—in another capacity, Miss Vintry."
"It looks as if your thoughts were running on such things." She did not affect not to understand, but she was not easy to corner either.
"I'm afraid they always have been," Harry confessed, a confession without much trace of penitence.
"Mine don't often; and they're never supposed to—in my position."
"Oh, nonsense! Really that doesn't go down, Miss Vintry. Why, a girl like you, with such—"