She looked up and smiled.
"Busy! That sounds so strange, and so comic, coming from you!"
"And yet it is true," he said. "I have been busy thinking." If there was a touch of bitterness in his voice she did not notice it. "And that's hard work for me—it's so new, you see."
There was silence for a moment. He held the string with which he had been tying up the books in his hands, and fidgeted with it restlessly. Lady Eleanor dropped into small-talk. Had he been to the chrysanthemum show at the Temple? Had he noticed that the Duchess of Orloffe was not going to give her autumn ball? Did he—
He broke in suddenly as if he had not been listening, his voice hoarse and thick:
"Eleanor, why did you do it?"
"Why did I—do what, Yorke?" she said.
"Why did you fling so much money away upon a worthless scamp?" His face went white, then red.
"Who told you?" she breathed.
"They told me down at the court where I had gone to be disgraced," he said, "and you saved me! How can I thank you, Eleanor? How can I? And you would have done it in secret, would have kept it from me?"