At the curtness of his speech a very faint wave of color ran up her cheek; and when he saw this he was sorry and glad in a single breath. At least, she could not say afterwards that he had ever tried to make himself falsely civil and lyingly agreeable. "Yes, I have stayed very much too long already. You've promised that you will be careful, haven't you? I'm really too sorry," she said, from the door, "that your visit to Hunston should have been made disagreeable in all these ways."
"In the name of heaven," he said, stung into momentary recklessness, "you don't suppose that I came here expecting any fun!"
"Why—I had understood that it was purely a pleasure-trip that brought you here!"
He made no answer to this, but stepped forward and swung open the door for her.
"Maginnis," he said, "is to call for me immediately in a motor. We shall leave by the unobtrusive back alley. Two men, a motor, and a dark rear exit. You will scarcely imagine that there is any danger now. But may I thank you again for giving us warning when there was, perhaps, some danger?"
"So you think there is a 'perhaps'? If you take precautions, it is only to humor a—"
"I withdraw that 'perhaps,'" he broke out in a rush. "I blot it out, annihilate it. Who am I to catch at tatters of self-respect? Are you blind? Can't you see that every fiber of me is tingling with the knowledge that there was real danger, and that you saved me from it?"
The quick bitterness in his voice, which there was no missing, was the last straw, breaking through her reserve, demolishing her dainty aloofness. She shook the swinging gray veil back out of her eyes and looked up at him, openly and frankly bewildered, looking very young and immeasurably alluring.
"Will you tell me why you speak in that way? Will you tell me why it is the worst thing that has happened to you in Hunston to have been helped a little by me?"
They faced each other at the open door, not an arm's length between them; and the moment of his reckoning for the quarter of an hour he had spent with her that night was suddenly upon him. He met her eyes, which were darkly blue, stared down into them; and as he did so, the spell of her beauty treacherously closed round him, piping away his self-control, deadening him to the iron fact of who she was and who he was, shutting out all knowledge except that of her fragrant nearness.