The widow smiled bravely up into the grave young face.
'I am afraid,' she began, '...yes, I am afraid you are right. But the anxiety was not wholly on your account.'
Trist turned slowly away. The movement was an excess of caution, for his face was always impenetrable.
'Ah!' he murmured.
'I am very anxious about Alice and Brenda.'
'Ah!' he murmured again, with additional sympathy.
She did not proceed at once, so he leant back in the chair he had assumed, and waited with that peculiar patience which seemed to belong to Eastern lands, and which has been noticed before.
'Theo,' she said at last, 'has it never struck you that your position with regard to those two girls is—to say the least of it—peculiar?'
'From a social point of view?'
'Yes.'