“We heard you coming in.”
Acton meditated. “You had been with the Baroness, then?”
“I was in the parlor. We heard your step outside. I thought it was my father.”
“And on that,” asked Acton, “you ran away?”
“She told me to go—to go out by the studio.”
Acton meditated more intensely; if there had been a chair at hand he would have sat down. “Why should she wish you not to meet your father?”
“Well,” said Clifford, “father doesn’t like to see me there.”
Acton looked askance at his companion and forbore to make any comment upon this assertion. “Has he said so,” he asked, “to the Baroness?”
“Well, I hope not,” said Clifford. “He hasn’t said so—in so many words—to me. But I know it worries him; and I want to stop worrying him. The Baroness knows it, and she wants me to stop, too.”
“To stop coming to see her?”