“Are you not also curious to penetrate the mysteries behind the wall, Mr. Ledsam?” Margaret asked.
“Not so curious but that I would much prefer to remain here,” he answered.
“With me?”
“With you.”
She knocked the ash from her cigarette. She was looking directly at him, and he fancied that there was a gleam of curiosity in her beautiful eyes. There was certainly a little more abandon about her attitude. She was leaning back in a corner of her high-backed chair, and her gown, although it lacked the daring of Lady Cynthia's, seemed to rest about her like a cloud of blue-grey smoke.
“What a curious meal!” she murmured. “Can you solve a puzzle for me, Mr. Ledsam?”
“I would do anything for you that I could,” he answered.
“Tell me, then, why my father asked you here to-night? I can understand his bringing you to the opera, that was just a whim of the moment, but an invitation down here savours of deliberation. Studiously polite though you are to one another, one is conscious all the time of the hostility beneath the surface.”
“I think that so far as your father is concerned, it is part of his peculiar disposition,” Francis replied. “You remember he once said that he was tired of entertaining his friends—that there was more pleasure in having an enemy at the board.”
“Are you an enemy, Mr. Ledsam?” she asked curiously.