“You!—” Alymer’s uncle squared his shoulders, stroked his white moustache with a gallant air, and replied:
“Yes—er—Lorraine. We meet again, you see. I may say—er—I am very glad indeed that it is so,” and he advanced a step with outstretched hand.
But Lorraine was rooted to the spot where she stood, and a sudden, sharp fierceness seemed to burn in her eyes.
“Have—you—come—about—Alymer—Hermon?” she asked in slow, cutting tones, as if each word was hammered out of a seething whirlpool of suppressed emotions.
“Alymer is my nephew, and his mother asked me to come and—er—talk to you about him. She is a good deal perturbed on his behalf—er—because—”
“I do not want to know any more than I am able to gather from the extraordinary epistle I received from her this morning. What I should like to know is, did you agree to come here on this errand, knowing who I was?”
The faded blue eyes of the carefully dressed old roué began to look uncomfortably from one object to another; anywhere, indeed, but into those scorching orbs, with their suppressed fires.
Then he took his courage in his hands, and tried again.
“My dear Lorraine, you seem to be taking rather a theatrical view of a very commonplace matter. Of course it is bad for the boy to get mixed up in a scandal, just at the beginning of his career, or, for the matter of that, talked about with a celebrated actress whose husband is known to be living somewhere. I have come to you as a man of the world, to ask you as a woman of the world to be generous in the matter, and help me to set the minds of his parents at rest at once—”
“Ah! It was as a man of the world you came to me before; but then I—I”—she gave a low, unpleasant laugh—“I wasn’t a woman of the world, you see, until you had taught me, and left me.”