He began again. "I haven't come to see the château, either—madame. I've come to see you."
She made one of her little plunges. "Oh, indeed! Have you? I thought you'd learned better than that—over there. You used to come in ship-loads, but—"
He began to feel more sure of himself. "When I say I came to see you, madame, I mean, I came to—to tell you something."
"Then, so long as it's not on business, I don't want to hear it. I suppose you're one of Walter Davenant's boys? I don't consider him any relation to me at all. It's too distant. If I acknowledged all the cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and Adam. Are you the first or the second wife's son?"
He explained his connection with the Davenant name. "But that isn't what I came to talk about, madame—not about myself. I wanted to tell you of—of your nephew—Mr. Henry Guion."
She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand stretched behind her. "Don't. I don't want to hear about him. Nor about my niece. They're strangers to me. I don't know them."
"You'd like to know them now, madame—because they're in great trouble."
She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.
"I dare say. It's what they were likely to come to. I told my niece so, the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation. But I told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn't to look to me."
"She isn't looking to you, madame. I am. I'm looking to you because I imagine you can help her. There's no one else—"