The girl turned her face slightly, and her childlike blue eyes sought his with a quaint air of scrutiny.
'When,' she said, 'you left Suffolk Mansions this afternoon with Alice, you had no intention of returning to London to-night.'
There was no mistaking the deliberation of her assertion. She was defying him—daring him to deny.
He met her glance for a moment—no longer.
'That,' he confessed airily, after a pause, 'is so!'
'And,' continued the girl with more confidence, 'since that time your views respecting Alice have become modified or changed in some way, perhaps?'
He moved with some uneasiness, and appeared particularly wishful to avoid encountering her frank gaze. He clasped his two hands around his raised knee, and stared at the carpet with a non-committing silence which was almost Oriental in its density.
'Brenda,' he whispered at length, 'I have had an awful scare!'
She drew in a deep breath with a little shivering sound, and moistened her lips—first the lower, and then the upper. There was a momentary gleam of short, pearly teeth, and the red Cupid's-bow of her mouth reassumed its usual contour of demure self-reliance.
There was a long pause, during which the faint echo of distant applause came to their ears.