The professor looked at his daughter with an expression of pained surprise.
“My dear,” he explained, “your sister Elizabeth has always been the moneyed one of the family. She has brains and I trust her. It is not for me to inquire as to the source of the comforts she provides for me. I feel myself entitled to receive them, and so I accept.”
“But, father,” she went on, “can't you see—don't you know that it's his money—Wenham's?”
“It is not a matter, this, my child,” the professor observed, sharply, “which we can discuss before strangers. Some day we will speak of it, you and I.”
“Has he—been heard of?” she asked, in a whisper.
The professor frowned.
“A hot-tempered young man, my dear,” he declared uneasily, “a hot tempered young man, indeed. Elizabeth gives me to understand that it was just an ordinary quarrel and away he went.”
Beatrice was white to the lips.
“An ordinary quarrel!” she muttered.
She sat quite still. Tavernake unconsciously found himself watching her. There were things in her eyes which frightened him. It seemed as though she were looking out of the gay little restaurant, with its lights and music and air of comfort, out into some distant quarter of the world, some other and very different place. She was living through something which chilled her heart, something terrifying. Tavernake saw those things in her face and his eyes spelt them out mercilessly.