It seemed an unwarranted question, but the girl admitted the truth frankly.
“In one sense I did. I suggested that there was no reason why you should listen to me.”
Wyllard smiled again. “Nellie and her husband are good friends of mine, but sometimes our friends are a little too officious. Anyway, it doesn’t count. If you had had that right, you would have told me to go.”
Agatha felt the warm blood rise to her cheeks. It seemed to her that he had paid her a great and sincere compliment in taking it for granted that if she had loved him she would still have bidden him undertake his perilous duty.
“Ah,” she said, “I don’t know. Perhaps I should not have been brave enough.”
It was not a judicious answer. She realized that, but she felt that she must speak with unhesitating candor.
“After all,” she added, “can you be quite sure that this is your duty?”
Wyllard kept his eye on her. “No,” he said, “I can’t. In fact, when I sit down to think I can see at least a dozen reasons why it doesn’t concern me. In a case of this kind that’s always easy. It’s just borne in upon me—I don’t know how—that I have to go.”
Agatha crossed to the window and sat down. He leaned upon a chairback looking at her gravely.
“Well,” he continued, “we’ll go on a little further. It seems better that I should make what’s in my mind quite clear to you. You see, Captain Dampier and I start in a week.”