“Thank you, Tom, for all your goodness to him. I am very sorry I ever misunderstood you, and said such hard things of and to you. You have got the best of it in the end, by heaping coals of fire upon me.”
He smiled slightly.
“My dear Monica, you don’t suppose I troubled my head over your ladyship’s righteous wrath. I found it very amusing, I assure you.”
“I believe you did,” assented Monica, smiling in turn; “which made things a little trying for me. Tom, I believe you have always been my friend, even when we have seemed most bitterly opposed.”
The sudden earnestness of her manner made him look at her keenly, and he spoke without his usual half-mocking intonation.
“I hope so, Monica. I wish to have the right to call myself your friend.”
He looked steadily at her, knowing there was more to follow. She was silent for a time, and then came a sudden and most unexpected question, and one apparently most irrelevant.
“Do you know Sir Conrad Fitzgerald?”
“I used to know him when he was a child. I knew him slightly at Oxford. He has made no attempt to renew the acquaintance since he has been down here; and, judging by what I have heard, I should not be inclined to encourage him if he did.”
“But there would be nothing extraordinary in your visiting him?”