"Safe?" he repeated, smiling, "then were you ever really in danger?"
Her glance puzzled him, and she followed it a moment afterward with a sentence which had the effect of increasing, rather than diminishing, the obscurity in which he floundered.
"In danger of losing my head, do you mean?" she asked, "Wasn't that question answered when I ran away?"
But the next instant she burst into a laugh of ridicule, and threw herself back into the chair upon the hearthrug, with the particular fall of drapery by which she delighted the eyes of her audience in the opera house.
"I asked your man to bring me tea, for I'm famished," she remarked; "do you think he has forgotten it?"
"He had, probably, to go out to buy the cakes," he replied, with a touch upon the bell which was immediately answered by Wilkins bearing the silver tray. As she rose to make tea, Kemper took the fur boa from her shoulders and held it for a minute to his nostrils.
"You use the same perfume, I notice," he observed.
She waited until the door had closed upon Wilkins, and then looked up, smiling, as she handed him his cup.
"There are two things one should never change," she returned, "a perfume and a lover."
With a laugh he tossed the fur upon the sofa. "By Jove, you've arrived at the conventional morality at last."