He acquiesced, and took a seat in the chair from which Maynard had run the emotional gamut the previous evening.
'You look pale,' she said, drawing a chair near the fire. 'I hope you have not been unwell.'
'No—no; it is merely that I have been so little out of doors. I could not gather from your note what kind of work you were engaged in. I see you are an ambulance-driver. I congratulate you.'
His voice conveyed nothing but polite interest in an obvious situation. With over-sensitive apprehension she listened for any suggestion of sarcasm that lay behind his words, but she could detect nothing beyond mere impersonal courtesy—that, and a far-off weariness, as of one who has passed the borders of fatigue.
'I wrote to your mother,' he said, 'when I heard of your elder brother's death. It must have been a great grief to you all.'
She did not answer him. His manner was so cold that he might have been deliberately disposing of a number of prepared comments rendered imperative by the laws of polite intercourse.
'Why didn't you let us know you had seen Dick?' she said abruptly.
'Then—you have heard?' He raised his eyebrows in surprise.
'Only last night, by the merest accident. He might have been killed in France, and we should never have known about it.' Her words were resentful and swift. 'Will you please tell me about him?'
Omitting the incident of Archibald's tavern, Selwyn told of the chance meeting with Dick, the encounter with Johnston Smyth, the night at the rooms in St. James's Square, and the subsequent glimpse of them marching through Whitehall.