"But that is no answer. Are you afraid to answer me?"
He laughed at that, laughed easily and naturally, in the tolerant fashion that most exasperated her.
"Oh, no; I'm not afraid. But I don't like hurting people's feelings—especially yours."
"I do not see how that is possible," she rejoined, with dignity, "where my feelings are not concerned."
"Ah, but that's where it is," he responded. "You like Fletcher well enough to be extremely indignant if anyone were to tell you that he is not a nice person for you to know."
"I object to unpleasant insinuations regarding any one," she said, with slightly heightened colour. "They always appear to me cowardly."
"Yes; but you asked, you know," Lord Ronald reminded her gently.
Her colour deepened. It was not often that he got the better of her; not often, indeed, that he exerted himself to do so. She began to wish ardently that he would go. Really, he was quite insufferable to-day.
Had he been a man of any perception whatever she would almost have thought that he fathomed her desire, for at this point he rose in a leisurely fashion as though upon the point of departure.
She rose also from behind the tea-table with a little inward pricking of conscience for wishing him gone. She wondered if he deemed her inhospitable, but if he did he disguised it very carefully, for his eyes held nothing but friendliness as they met her own.