"You are very late, doctor," she said. "I have been looking forward to a chat with you."
For once in his life Dr. Varney was genuinely astonished. He looked at Jessie in a vague, dreamy kind of way, though fortunately Lady Merehaven did not glance up and notice his face.
"There, you unbelieving man!" she cried. "Vera does not look as if she had met with anything serious in the way of an accident."
Dr. Varney pulled himself together promptly and took Jessie's outstretched hand. There was a twinkle in his shrewd eyes as he held the girl's fingers.
"Extraordinary mistake of mine, wasn't it?" he said. "Could have sworn that I saw you lying half asleep in one of the wards of Charing Cross Hospital. Case of shock and injured ankle. People said the patient called herself Harcourt, but could not recollect her address. Young girls have such queer escapades nowadays that——"
"But surely you know me better than that?" Jessie forced herself to say.
"I'm not quite so sure that I do," Varney chuckled. "However, the girl was very like you. Come and give me a sandwich and a glass of claret, and we'll talk of old times."
Jessie expressed herself as delighted, but inwardly she was praying for some diversion. She was quite convinced that the doctor was by no means satisfied; she could see that he was a shrewd, clever man of the world, and that he meant to question her adroitly. If once the conversation drifted to old times, she felt that she must be discovered.
But Varney ate his sandwich and sipped his claret and water with no reference to the past. He looked at Jessie once or twice in an abstracted kind of way. She felt that she must talk, that she must say something to start a safe conversation.