"And now you're going to tell me where she is and I'm to take her home and keep her out of his way. Is that it?"
"I don't know," said Lady St. Craye very truly, "why I came to you at all. Because it's all no good. He's written and proposed for her to her father—and if she cares—"
"Well, if she cares—and he cares—Do you really mean that you'd care to marry a man who's in love with another woman?"
"I'd marry him if he was in love with fifty other women."
"In that case," said Miss Desmond, "I should say you were the very wife for him."
"She isn't," said Lady St. Craye sitting up. "I feel like a silly school-girl talking to you like this. I think I'll go now. I'm not really so silly as I seem. I've been ill—influenza, you know—and I got so frightfully tired. And I don't think I'm so strong as I used to be. I've always thought I was strong enough to play any part I wanted to play. But—you've been very kind. I'll go—" She lay back.
"Don't be silly," said Miss Desmond briskly. "You are a school-girl compared with me, you know. I suppose you've been trying to play the rôle of the designing heroine—to part true lovers and so on, and then you found you couldn't."
"They're not true lovers," said Lady St. Craye eagerly; "that's just it. She'd never make him happy. She's too young and too innocent. And when she found out what a man like him is like, she'd break her heart. And he told me he'd be happier with me than he ever had been with her."
"Was that true, or—?"
"Oh, yes, it was true enough, though he said it. You've met him—he told me. But you don't know him."