“Me only—me and her? Certainly I ought to be obliged, even though it’s late in the day. The first time you saw her I suppose you told her—that night you went into her box at the theatre, eh? She’d have worse to tell you, I’m sure, if she could ever bring herself to speak the proper truth. And do you mean to say you never broke it to your big friend in the chemical line?”
“No, we’ve never talked about it.”
“Men are rare creatures!” Millicent cried. “You never so much as mentioned it?”
“It wasn’t necessary. He knew it otherwise—he knew it through his sister.”
“How do you know that if he never spoke?”
“Oh because he was jolly good to me,” said Hyacinth.
“Well, I don’t suppose that ruined him,” Miss Henning rejoined. “And how did his sister know it?”
“Oh I don’t know. She guessed it.”
The girl stared, then fairly snorted. “It was none of her business.” Then she added: “He was jolly good to you? Ain’t he good to you now?” She asked this question in her loud free voice, which rang through the bright stillness of the place.
Hyacinth delayed for a minute to meet it, and when at last he did so it was without looking at her. “I don’t know. I can’t make it out.”