She raised her eyebrows.
"Indeed! I cannot imagine how it should affect you personally."
"I perhaps said more than I meant to," he replied, calmly. "I am a poor, struggling politician myself, whose capital consists of brains and a capacity for work, and whose hopes are coloured with perhaps too daring ambitions. Amongst them—"
"Mr. Mannering has holed out from off the green," she interrupted. "Positively immoral, I call it."
"Amongst them," Borrowdean continued, calmly, "is one which some day or other I must tell you, for indeed you are concerned in it."
"I can assure you, Sir Leslie," she said, looking at him steadily, "that I am not at all a sympathetic person. My strong advice to you would be—not to tell me. I do not think that you would gain anything by it."
Borrowdean met his fate with a bow and a shrug of the shoulders.
"It only remains," he said, "for me to beg you to pardon what might seem like presumption. Shall we meet them on the last green?"
Mannering would have avoided Berenice, but she gave him no option. She laid her hand upon his arm, and volunteered to show him a new way home.
"You must be on your guard, Lawrence," she said. "Lord Redford is very fond of concealing his plans to the last moment, but he is a very clever man. And Sir Leslie Borrowdean would give his little finger to catch you tripping. All this avoidance of politics is part of a scheme. They will spring something upon you quite suddenly. Don't give any hasty pledges."