"I thoroughly understand that; but may I ask if it's in the way of warning or of threat?"
"It's in the way of both. You must see that, whatever risks I may be prepared to run myself, as long as I have Marion with me I can't expose her to—"
"To what?"
Notwithstanding his efforts to keep the conversation to a tone of banter, acrimonious though it had to be, Derek was unable to pronounce the two brief syllables without betraying some degree of anger. Glancing up at him as she shrank under her weight of jewels, Mrs. Bayford found him very big and menacing; but she was a brave woman, and if she shrivelled, it was only as a cat shrivels before springing at a mastiff.
"I can't expose her to the chance of meeting—"
She paused, not from hesitation, but with the rhetorical intention of making the end of her phrase more telling.
"My future wife," he whispered, before she had time to go on. "It's only fair to tell you that."
"Good heavens! You're not going to marry the creature!"
Mrs. Bayford brought out the words with the dramatic action and intensity they deserved. In the hum of talk around and across the table it was doubtful whether or not they were heard, and yet more than one of the guests glanced up with a look of interrogation. Dorothea caught her father's eyes in a gaze which he had some difficulty in returning with the proper amount of steadiness; but Mrs. Berrington Jones came to the rescue of the company by asking Mrs. Bayford to tell the amusing story of how her bath had been managed in Japan.
So the incident passed by, leaving a sense of mystery in the air; though for Derek, all sense of annoyance disappeared in the knowledge that he was Diane's champion.