I looked round at the company and met the eyes of the neighbour on my right. They were unhappy eyes; but they reassured me.
"What put such an idea into your head?" Aunt Josephine was asking Betty.
"Because," Betty said, and she looked at the young man again, "only because I saw so many of your—of Mr. Whitby-Dawson's photographs——"
"Really?" the young man said, in a bored voice. "That was, no doubt, a great privilege. My name's Williams."
In her embarrassment Betty turned to the man who sat between us. "He has even the little scar," she said, like a person defending herself. "Mr. Whitby-Dawson got his scar in a duel with a student at Heidelberg. He studied at the University there part of one year——"
"Studied duelling?" the Colonel chuckled. Our absent-minded man was not absent-minded any more. He was listening, with a look I could not understand, as if he took a malicious pleasure in poor Betty's mistake. Such a trifling slip to have taken the young man for Guy Whitby-Dawson, and yet it seemed to have put the company out of tune. Or perhaps it was the loss of the race. All except my man seemed to care very much about the lost race. The Tartar, in his annoyed voice, told his hostess and the Colonel how it happened. He leaned his elbow on the table, and almost turned his back on poor Bettina.
I thought I could see that my man seemed not to like The Tartar; and that gave me a kindlier feeling towards him; I wondered what had made him unhappy.
I felt I wanted to justify Bettina to him.
I felt, too, that she would recover herself sooner if we broke the silence at our end. So I said—in a voice too low, I thought, for the others to hear—that I also had noticed the resemblance to Mr. Whitby-Dawson. Lower still, he asked me how we came "to hear of Mr.—of—the gentleman in question." Then Betty and I between us told about Hermione Helmstone's engagement—only we did not, of course, give her name.
"The faithless Whitby!" our man said, with the tail of his eye on the young gentleman opposite. As for him, he tried to go on talking about "Black Friar," as though he heard nothing of the history being retailed on the other side. But I had a feeling that he was listening all the time.