She looked at him in sheer astonishment. He still held her hand with the packet clasped in it.
"What if I am not the delinquent after all?" he said.
"What do you mean?" Her eyes met his again, wide and incredulous.
"What if I tell you that this packet—whatever it contains—did not come from me?"
He asked the question with a faint smile that set some chord of memory vibrating strangely in her soul. But she could not stop to wrestle with memory then. His words demanded her instant attention.
"Not come from you!" she repeated, as one dazed. "But it did! Surely it did!"
"Most surely it didn't!" said Noel.
She freed her hand and opened it, gazing at the subject of their discussion almost with fear. "Mr. Wyndham!"
"Call me Noel!" he said. "There's nothing in that. Everybody does it.
And don't be upset on my account! It was a perfectly natural mistake.
I'm deeply in love with you. But—all the same—this present did not
come from me."
"It had your initials," she said, still only half believing.