'Well, perhaps you are right to seek one more cheerfully placed. You are not looking well; perhaps this situation depresses you?'
'Oh, I'm all right, thanks. I'm rather glad you happened to call, because I shall perhaps not see you again. I'm afraid I was rather uncivil yesterday, and, if so, I'm sorry: I didn't intend it, but it struck me afterwards that it might seem so to you. The fact is, I was horribly put out about something.'
'Oh, don't mention it. I saw then that you were annoyed about something, and now I know what it was. I know enough of English manners, Mr Ferrier, to know that here a stranger's interference in personal or family matters is the unpardonable sin. But my faith, you know, compels me to set aside conventions that are only conventions, and to try to give help wherever help can be given.
'I am so complete a stranger,' he went on, regardless of a slight movement of impatience from the other, 'so utterly, so palpably disinterested, that I hope I may without offence say to you what I intended to say to Mr Roland.'
'I don't see that anything could be said to my brother without offence that could not equally well be said to me.'
'This, then, is what I would ask. Is there anything I can do to effect a reconciliation between you and your brother, and prevent this breach from growing wider?'
'I had never told you that there was any breach,' Richard said stiffly.
'No,' he said, 'but all others have not your powers of reticence.'
'I presume my brother has been confiding in you.'
'Your brother told me—what perhaps his pride forbade him to tell you—that you had accused him of something of which he assured me he was as innocent as—as I am,' ended Litvinoff, raising his eyebrows ingenuously.