“I saw you kissing the parlourmaid this morning. You are a married man, I believe?”
Trenter blinked apprehensively. He was indeed married.
“I do not wish that sort of thing to happen again,” said Gordon, mildly scandalised. “You are a married man with responsibilities which cannot be ignored or set on one side. Eleanor, as I understand her name to be, is a young girl, possibly inflammable, certainly impressionable. To cloud a young girl’s life by awakening in her heart a passion which you cannot return is most reprehensible. Even I have been rocked by the current which the stone you cast has set into motion. My shaving water was late this morning. This must not occur again.”
“No, sir,” said Trenter.
News comes instantly to the servants’ hall in any event. Now, telepathy lagged behind Trenter’s spoken word.
Eleanor, tall, svelte, pallid of face, black eyebrows and eyes that flashed, interrupted the operation of a lip-stick to listen. She was tremulously indignant.
“Because he’s a St. Andrew, does he think that we haven’t any human feelings? The poor cold-blooded fish! I’ll let him know that I won’t be talked about and my name took away—taken away, I mean—by a prying, sneaking, rubber-soled spy. He is too!”
“Who’s this St. Andrew?” Trenter was suspicious of all saints, being by marriage a Primitive Baptist.
“He’s the man that women tempted and he wouldn’t,” said Eleanor, prepared to drop the illustration. But Trenter was of another mind.
“Who’s been tempting him?” he asked, darkling eyed.