“You know you can always depend upon me for help and advice?”
“O, most disinterestedly!”
His jaw seemed to stick as he opened it to answer. She laughed, as she turned her back on him.
“Ah!” he breathed out. “I see you’ll make it up with Philip yet.”
With a stamp of her foot, she flared round on him in a final spasm of anger.
“You dare to say so! I tell you, once and for all, that from this moment it is eternal silence between us.”
He watched her, from under lowered lids, and with a furtive smile on his lips, sweep from the room, then twitched up his shoulders to a noiseless laugh. To make certain of her fixed resolution—that was why he had provoked her to that last retort. Now at length it should be safe for him to act. If only that dubious manner of hers had left him with more conviction as to his own ultimate profit in the matter! But like enough it had been mere coquetry.
He left Whitehall shortly, and made his way to “The Mischief” Inn, where he found Mrs. Davis bored to death over her confinement to her room, and in a very fractious mood.
“Have you come to take me away?” she said. “You called yourself my friend.”
“Why, so I am,” he answered. “What have I done to disprove it?”