“O, it doesn’t matter! Only, as a question of this confiding friendship——”
“It isn’t my secret alone.”
“Then I’ve no more to say. But I presume she’s the—the flower in question?”
“O, yes! And I’m the stick.”
He said it with a quiet laugh.
“I shouldn’t have supposed it, on my honour,” I assured him. “You can have stuck at very little in a week.”
I took a few turns, and faced him, or his motionless shadow, very solemnly.
“Now,” I demanded, “for the plain speaking. Will you answer me the truth? I brought away an impression, as I said. It might have been, after all, an impertinent one. A man’s a man for a’ that—though I confess I can’t quite apply the moral to a woman. Still, I’ll ask you frankly: How is she socially?”
“Nothing at all. Her father was a colour-sergeant, a red-headed Celt from over the border of dreams. He’s gone to join the Duke of Argyll’s cloud army at Inverary. Her aunt’s an ex-coryphée living on a mysterious pension.”
“Of course; only rather worse than I supposed.”