"Is there any reason why I should not?" he asked her gravely.
She bit her lips hard. They were crossing the road now. After all, it was only a few months since she had bidden him go his own way and leave her to regulate her own friendships.
"No reason at all," she admitted, "only I cannot see why you choose to advertise yourself with an opera singer—you, an ambitious politician, who moves with his head in the clouds, and to whom women are no more than a pastime. Why have you waited all these years to commence a flirtation under my very nose!"
He looked at her sternly.
"I think that you are a little excited, Violet," he said. "You surely don't realise what you are saying."
"Excited! Tell me once more—you got my note, the one I wrote this evening?"
"Certainly."
His brief reply was convincing. She remembered the few impulsive lines which she had written from her heart in that moment of glad relief. There was no sign in his face that he had been touched. Even at that moment he had drawn out his watch and was looking at it.
"Thank you for bringing me here," she said, as they stood upon the steps of the hotel. "Don't let me keep you."
"After all," he decided, "I think that I shall go up to my room for a minute. Good night!"