"That is true," Melville admitted. "I must plead guilty to not being goody-goody. By the way, am I to call you 'aunt'?"
Mrs. Sinclair shuddered.
"Certainly not," she said emphatically; "there is no necessity to draw public attention to the question of my age."
"What am I to call you?" he persisted.
"Call me Mrs. Sinclair," she said. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-five," Melville answered. "Why?"
"Then you are old enough to call me Lavender when we are alone," she said. "Out of doors it had better be Mrs. Sinclair, I suppose. It is a censorious world."
She leaned back in her chair and surveyed her nephew critically; the scrutiny was satisfactory, and she was glad of the impulse that had prompted her to disclose her identity to him. Yet, shrewd and clever woman as she was, she had taken a step which, while it could never be retraced, was the first towards the undoing of them both. There were other things in her life which in her hours of reflection she regretted, not least among them being her separation from a husband whose good qualities she fully recognised, but nothing in the past had been so fraught with peril to herself as this alliance with her husband's nephew, which she owed to a single moment of caprice.
"Confess now," she said presently, "you are burning with curiosity to know all about everything?"
"That is a comprehensive way of putting it," he laughed, "but it is true. Tell me everything that is necessary, and as much more as you think fit."