"Seriously speaking," she said, "I think I ought to know. If there is nothing more, if your conscience allows you to say that there is nothing to tell, I am content. If you can not say that, I think you ought to tell me."
"Do you not think that you are putting an unfair pressure on me?" asked Harry.
"No, for you are no longer only your own master. You must consider not only yourself, but Evie. In her mother's absence I have a certain duty toward her. I do not ask you from curiosity, but because of the relations in which both you and I stand to her. You have within the last few weeks been in three positions of extreme personal danger. Can you, however vaguely, account for this? Have there been no suspicious circumstances of any kind which might lead any one to think that these were not entirely accidents? You say that Geoffrey was in the house on all these occasions. Did he take it all as lightly as you seem to?"
"I would rather not bring Geoffrey into it," said Harry.
"Have you quarrelled?"
"Yes, I suppose you may say that we have quarrelled," he replied.
"Harry, why will you not tell me, and save my asking you all these questions? I intend to go on asking them. Was your quarrel with Geoffrey connected in any way with these accidents?"
"Oh, give me a minute!" cried Harry. "I want to make up my mind whether I am going to tell you or not. I suppose, if I did not, you would go to Geoff."
"Certainly I should," said Lady Oxted promptly, although this had not occurred to her.
"Well, it is better that I should tell you than he," said Harry, and without more words he told her all that he had purposely left unsaid, from the mistaken direction which had sent him to the ice house instead of the summerhouse, down to the scene in the smoking room when he had parted with Geoffrey. She heard him in silence without question or interruption, and when he had finished, still she said nothing. Apt and ready as she was for the ordinary social emergency, she could frame nothing for this. She could not say what she thought, outspokenly like Geoffrey, for Harry's sake; she would not say what she did not think, in spite of her diplomatic tendencies, for her own.