“You will wish to return to England?”
I hesitated. There was something behind his question I could not read. “I suppose so—yes, of course I shall return there. My home is there.”
He bent a kind but searching look on me. “I hope you think I am your friend as well as——” he said after a pause, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“Oh, yes indeed. I should be sorry not to think so. Is—is Volna going home to Warsaw?”
“Have you been quite frank with me? I don’t mean that unkindly,” he hastened to add in reply to a start from me. “As to your motive in all this? It will be best to be quite frank. Young folks are young folks all the world over.”
“I should be sorry to misunderstand you,” I said.
“You entered into this thing from love—of adventure only?”
“As it is over, does my motive matter?”
He shook his head slowly. “It may. It may. I don’t know. It may. I am so afraid of appearing impertinent, or of making a mistake. We old people fall so readily into mistakes,” he said with a deprecating smile.
“Don’t you think the best way to avoid them is to speak plainly?”