“You put strange ideas into my head,” he told her lightly. “Why should I not play the part that you suggest? It might be amusing, and you certainly deserve all the evil which I could bring upon you.”
She leaned a little across the table towards him. Her eyes were soft and bright, and they looked full into his. The color in her cheeks was natural. The air around him was faintly fragrant with the perfume of her clothes and hair.
“We couldn’t leave off playing at the game—and act it, could we?” she murmured. “We couldn’t really—be friends?”
Lady Ruth had played her trump card. She had touched his fingers with hers, her eyes shone with the promise of unutterable things. But if Wingrave was moved, he did not show it.
“I wish,” he said, “that I could accept your offer in the spirit with which you tender it. Unfortunately, I am a maimed person. My sensibilities have gone. Friendship, in the more intimate sense of the word, I may never hope to feel again. Enmity—well, that is more comprehensible; even enmity,” he continued slowly, “which might prompt a woman to disguise herself as her own lady’s maid, to seek out a tool to get rid of the man she feared. Pardon me, Lady Ruth, you are eating nothing.”
She pulled down her veil.
“Thank you, I have finished,” she said in a low tone.
He called for the bill.
“Pray, don’t let my little remark distress you,” he said. “I had almost forgotten the circumstance until something you said brought it into my mind. It is you yourself, you must remember, who set the example of candor.”
“I deserve everything you can say,” she murmured, “everything you can do. There is nothing left, I suppose, but suffering. Will you take me out to my carriage? You can come back and have your coffee with the Marchioness! She keeps looking across at you, and it will please her to think that you got rid of me.”