'Oh?' said the lady, unconvinced.
'I thought she'd given up coming.'
'Well, she's begun again. She's helping me about something.'
'Oh, helping you, is she?' said Farnborough with absent eyes; and then suddenly 'all there,' 'Lady John, I've come to ask you to help me.'
'With Miss Levering?' said Hermione Heriot's aunt. 'I can't do it.'
'No, no—all that's no good. She only laughs.'
'Oh,' breathed the lady, relieved, 'she looks upon you as a boy.'
'Such nonsense,' he burst out suddenly. 'What do you think she said to me the day before she went off yachting?'
'That she was four years older than you?'
'Oh, I knew that. No. She said she knew she was all the charming things I'd been saying, but there was only one way to prove it, and that was to marry some one young enough to be her son. She'd noticed, she said, that was what the most attractive women did—and she named names.'