A bait! He saw in a flash the peculiar implications of the word she had used, but hesitated to accept them.
"You can't mean that Mr Kenyon has deliberately tried to—throw us together, in order to keep me in the house?" he urged, his tone apologising for the unlikelihood of such a wild deduction.
"Of course I mean that," she returned bitterly.
"But why?" he pressed her. "Why should he want to keep me as much as all that?"
"He does," she said, and then as he was manifestly still doubtful, continued, "I can't tell you why. I don't know. I only know that he wants to keep us all there till he dies. But you—you were different. I wondered when he first invited you what he meant to do. There was something I disliked, instinctively, in the way he asked about you. It was just as if he—he was trying to catch you then. And when I saw you that first night I tried to warn you. I daren't say very much. We none of us dare because we know that he's—oh! inhuman in a way; that he would turn any one of us out to-morrow without a penny if he thought that we were working against him.
"Oh! surely not," Arthur protested.
She laughed scornfully. "He seems to have made you believe in him," she said.
"He has been most frightfully decent to me, you see," Arthur replied emphatically.
"Did he say anything to you about my father yesterday?" she asked, turning to face him for the first time.
"Something," he acknowledged.