“Well?” he said, with a gentleness in his voice of which he was not aware.
“I’m afraid I’ve been causing a lot of trouble.” The tone of regret was so perfectly sincere that it threw him off his guard. He had not expected this, nay, he had looked for something totally different. The girl was a lady, no matter what her private circumstances might be, and with a sudden deep annoyance he felt that it was going to be supremely difficult to say in just so many words what he had to say.
To his relief, however, she seemed with the flair of her sex at once to divine his difficulty. This splendid-looking old man, every inch of whom was grand seigneur, poor old snowboot included! was already asking mutely for her help in a situation that she knew he must dislike intensely. In his odd silence, in the defensive arrogance of his manner there was appeal to her own fineness. She could not help feeling an instinctive sympathy with this old grandee, who at the very outset was finding himself unequal to the task imposed upon him by the circumstances of the case.
They entered on a long pause, and it was left to her to break it.
“I didn’t know when I promised to marry Jack that he would be the next Duke of Bridport,” she said very slowly at last.
The simple speech was intended to help him, a fact of which he was well aware. And with a sense of acute annoyance he felt a latent chivalry begin to stir him; it was a chord that she, of all people, had no right to touch.
“Didn’t you?” he said; and in the grip of this new emotion it would have been not unpleasant to add “My dear.”
“Of course I’m much to blame,” she went on, encouraged by his tone. “I realize that one ought to have made inquiries.”
He was clearly puzzled. From under heavily knitted brows his keen eyes peered at her. “But why?” An instinct for fair play framed the question on her behalf.
A note of pain entered the charming voice. “Oh, one ought,” she said. “It was one’s duty to know who and what he was and all about him.”