The taper fingers, glittering with gems, closed on his arm. "Now don't be silly," came the quick answer from sweetly protesting lips. "Every one seems to be trying to be silly over this horrible affair—Louise, Mr. Nugent, and now you yourself. I have just been calling Mr. Nugent over the coals for his preposterous counsel to that misguided French fool, and I told him what I now tell you—that my trust in your incapacity for such a deed is invincible. I burn with indignation that even a fool like Louise should have thought the contrary. That is why I chanced the risk of offending you, dear, by forcing the issue."
"You have indeed forced the issue, but there is nothing in all the wide world that you could do to offend me," said Leslie, and his half-strangled sob carried conviction.
But Violet Maynard wanted more than conviction on a point on which she was already convinced. She hungered for the confidence which she was too proud to demand as her right. Yet her lover showed no sign of according it. He just stood there staring at her, and looking half dazed in the electric glow, but he had evidently no intention of explaining why he was to have met Levison in the marsh, and why he had concealed the fact.
"Is that all you have to say to me?" asked Violet quietly.
And then, when her question evoked no reply, she turned and threaded her way back amid the tangle of exotic luxuriance to the drawing-room, leaving Leslie to follow like a man in a dream.
CHAPTER XVII
"THE BOOTLACE MAN"
On the following morning Enid Mallory, clad in a serviceable jersey and a short skirt, and carrying her golf clubs, was walking up and down the lawn at her father's house, perusing a letter received from Reggie by the early delivery. She had already read it twice, once before and once after breakfast, but like all maidens in similar cases she wanted to make sure that she had missed none of its honey, implied or expressed.
She looked up as her father came out and joined her. "I have heard from my young man," she said, proffering the letter. "We don't indulge in sentiment or secrets. Read it and see how the poor boy is going to be worked to death in serving an ungrateful country."