“She is living there now,” she remarked.
“Your father is dead too, I believe,” he continued, “and your mother.”
“Two years ago,” she answered. “They died within a few months of one another.”
“Very sad—very sad indeed,” he remarked uneasily. “I remember hearing something about it. I believe that the common report was that you and your sister had come to Paris to study painting.”
She assented gently.
“We have a small studio,” she murmured, “in the Rue de St. Pierre.”
Sir John looked at her sideways. Her eyes were fixed upon the ground, the pink colour coming and going in her cheeks was very delicate and girlish. After all, this could never be the black sheep. He had been quite right to sit down. It was astonishing how seldom it was that his instincts betrayed him. He breathed a little sigh of satisfaction.
“Come,” he continued, “the world after all is a very small place. We are not altogether strangers, are we? I feel that under the circumstances I have the right to offer you my advice, and if necessary my help. I beg that you will consider me your friend.”
She looked at him with fluttering eyelids—sweetly grateful. It was such an unexpected stroke of fortune. Sir John was not used to such glances, and he liked them.
“It is so difficult,” she murmured, “so impossible to explain. Even to my own brother—if I had one—I could not tell everything, and you, although you are so kind, you are almost a stranger, aren’t you?”