“You think the same still?” she retorted quickly.
“That is no excuse for having said it,” I returned. “It was not my affair.”
“It is nobody’s affair, I suppose, but mine.”
“Unless you allow it to be,” said I. I could not endure the desolation her words and tone implied.
She looked at me curiously.
“I don’t understand,” she said in a fretfully weary tone, “how you come to be mixed up in it at all.”
“It’s a long story.” Then I went on abruptly: “You thought it was someone else that had entered.”
“Well, if I did?”
“Someone returning,” said I stepping up to the table opposite her.
“What then?” she asked, but wearily and not in the defiant manner of the morning.