Our eyes met for a moment, but we said nothing. I looked away through the trees to the glimmering front of the Yellow House, and asked him a question softly.
“She has not any further suspicion, then?”
“None, I am sure,” he answered, confidently. “It is you whom she believes to be shielding the man. She has a strong idea that he is a friend of yours; strangely enough she seems to have taken a violent dislike to you too. I believe that the very fact of that dislike blinds her a little.”
“I agree with you as to the dislike. But why strangely?”
His firm lips parted a little. He looked at me with a smile.
“You do not appear to me,” he said, slowly, “to be a person to be disliked.”
I made a mental registration of that remark. It was the nearest approach to a compliment he had ever paid me.
“I am infinitely obliged,” I said. “At the same time I think I can understand her dislike.”
“You women are so quick at understanding one another,” he remarked.
“And men are so slow,” I replied. “Do you know I have an idea that if she were to come here now she would dislike me even more.”