I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her.
“I hope I may call myself your brother’s friend,” I began lamely. “All my sympathies are with him.”
“You don’t know the Jervaises particularly well?” she inquired. For one moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window.
“Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last night,” I explained. “I was at school and Cambridge with Frank.”
“But they are your sort, your class,” she said. “Don’t you agree with them that it’s a dreadful thing for Arthur, their chauffeur—and he was in the stables once, years ago—to try to run away with their daughter?”
“All my sympathies are with Arthur,” I repeated.
“Not because the Jervaises were so rude to you?” she asked.
“I liked him before that; when we met on the hill, very early this morning,” I said. “But, perhaps, he didn’t tell you.”
“Yes, he told me,” she said. “And was that the beginning of all the trouble between you and the Jervaises?”
“In a way, it was,” I agreed. “But it’s an involved story and very silly. I admit that they had grounds for suspecting that I had interfered.”