"Why not?" she asked him. "I should look upon it as the most natural thing in the world that we were acquainted. But why do you say 'your country'? Are you not an American?"
He looked at her with a very faint smile, a smile which had nothing in it of pleasantness or mirth.
"I have so few secrets," he said. "The only one which I elect to keep is the secret of my nationality."
She raised her eyebrows.
"Then you can no longer," she observed, "be considered what my brother and I once thought you—a man of mysteries—for with your voice and accent it is very certain that you are either English or American."
"If it affords you any further clue, then," he replied, "let me confide in you that if there is one country in this world which I detest, it is England; one race of people whom I abominate, it is the English."
She showed her surprise frankly, but his manner encouraged no further confidence. She touched the bell, and he bowed over her fingers.
"My friend Phillips," he said, in formal accents, as the butler stood upon the threshold, "will never live, I fear, to offer you all the gratitude he feels, but you are doing a very kind and a very wonderful action, Miss Beverley, and one which I think will bring its own reward."
He passed out of the room, leaving Katharine a prey to a curious tangle of emotions. She watched him almost feverishly until he had disappeared, listened to his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door. Then she hurried to the window, watched him descend the row of steps, pass down the little drive and hail a taxicab. It was not until he was out of sight that she became in any way like herself. Then she broke into a little laugh.
"Heavens alive!" she exclaimed to herself. "Now I have to find Aunt Molly and tell her that I am going to Europe to-morrow with a perfect stranger!"