“Oh, I didn’t say so, didn’t I? Well, she WAS a girl then, of course; a certain Miss Clifford. She got in at Chetwood. Her people live somewhere down there near Tilgate. At least, so I gathered from what she told me.”
Nevitt stared hard at the painter’s eyes, which tried, without success, to look unconscious.
“A romance!” he said, slowly, scanning his man with deep interest. “A romance, I can see. Young, rich, and beautiful. My dear Cyril, I only wish I’d had half your luck. What a splendid chance, and what a magnificent introduction! Beauty in distress! A lady in trouble! You console her alone in a tunnel for fifteen hours by yourself at a stretch. Heavens, what a tete-a-tete! Did British propriety ever before allow a man such a glorious opportunity for chivalrous devotion to a lady of family, face, and fortune?”
“Was she pretty?” Guy asked, coming down at once to a more realistic platform.
Cyril hesitated a moment. “Well, yes,” he answered, somewhat curtly, after a short pause. “She’s distinctly good-looking.” And he shut his mouth sharp. But he had said quite enough.
When a man says that of a girl, and nothing more, in an unconcerned voice, as if it didn’t matter twopence to him, you may be perfectly sure in your own mind he’s very deeply and seriously smitten.
“And young?” Guy continued.
“I should say about twenty.”
“And rich beyond the utmost dreams of avarice?” Montague Nevitt put in, with a faintly cynical smile.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Cyril answered truthfully. “I haven’t the least idea who she is, even. She and I had other things to think about, you may be sure, boxed up there so long in that narrow space, and choking for want of air, than minute investigations into one another’s pedigrees.”