The girl shrugged her shoulders.
“The supposition is at least as possible as that you are doing any vast amount of good for the seething cauldron of discontent, I think you called it, by breeding Aberdeens in the country. I’m afraid you’re a crank, Mr. Brooke, and not a very consistent one at that. And a crank is to my mind synonymous with a bore.”
The man replaced the picture in his desk.
“Then perhaps we had better join Mrs. Laverton,” he remarked. “I apologise for having wearied you.”
In silence they went out into the garden, to find Ada Laverton wandering aimlessly round looking for them.
“Where have you two been?” she demanded, as she saw them approaching.
“Mr. Brooke has been showing me a relic of his past,” said Lady Cynthia. “Most interesting and touching. Are you ready to go, Ada?”
Mrs. Laverton gave a quick glance at their two faces, and wondered what had happened. Not much, surely, in so short a time—and yet with Cynthia you never could tell. The Hermit’s face, usually so inscrutable, showed traces of suppressed feeling; Cynthia’s was rather too expressionless.
“Are you coming to the ball to-morrow night, Hermit?” she asked.
“I didn’t know there was one on, Mrs. Laverton,” he answered.