“You sounded whom?”
“Oh, the people who knew you best—and who knew me—Annette, Esther Coningsby, Ralph—any one to whom I thought you might have betrayed yourself by a word. But it was just as with Evelyn and Lady Rideover. You had practically not mentioned my name. Hilda Grace told me she tried to sound you—that Sunday at Rosyth.”
“Well?”
“I’m only quoting her, mind you. She said she didn’t get”—there was a repetition of that nervous laugh—“she said she didn’t get—any satisfaction. And so—”
I tried to take a reasonable tone. “But how could I tell you or anybody else before I’d confessed to you who I was and where you’d first seen me?”
“Exactly. I quite understand that—now that you’ve said what you’ve said to-night. It’s where the past makes us pay—”
“For what I used to be.”
“Oh, you’re not the only one,” she declared, in a curious, offhand tone. “It’s for what I used to be, too.”
I found it difficult to follow her. “What you used to be? I don’t understand you.”