"Before you and Mina Zabriska came to Blent—and brought Mr Cholderton?" He sat smiling a moment. "Forgive me; I'm very inhospitable," he said, and offered them cigarettes and whiskey.
Neeld refused; the Colonel took both.
"You may imagine with what feelings I heard your story," Edge resumed, "and found that the Comtesse's fraud was really the entire basis of your action. If I had been in England the thing need never have happened."
"It has happened," said Harry, "and—and I don't quite know where we are." For the world was all altered again, just when the struggle of the evening had seemed to settle it. The memory of the girl in the res
taurant flashed across his mind. What would she—what would she say to this?
Colonel Edge was evidently rather a talkative man. He began again, rather as though he were delivering a little set speech.
"It's perhaps hardly to be expected," he said, "that any degree of intimacy should exist between your family and mine, Lord Tristram, but I venture to hope that the part which it has been my privilege to play to-day may do something to obliterate the memories of the past. We don't perhaps know all the rights of it. I am loyal to my brother, but I knew the late Lady Tristram, and I can appreciate all that her friends valued and prized in her."
"Very good, Edge, very good," murmured emotional old Mr Neeld. "Very proper, most proper."
"And I hope that old quarrels need not be eternal?"
"I'm very much in your debt, and I'm sincerely grateful, Colonel Edge. As for the past—There are graves; let it lie in them."