"What do you think about it?" I asked him straight out.
He glanced at me in his turn with a curious baffling light in his dark eyes, and I felt as if he had stripped my soul bare of all pretences and was reading my thoughts in all their nakedness.
"I should think," he said at length with an air of absolute impartiality, "that Miss Drummond is the mistress of her own actions and neither you nor I have any right to dictate what she is to do."
"Have it your own way then," I said, with difficulty suppressing my rising anger. "But if anything goes wrong remember that I warned you beforehand."
"I'll remember that," Moira said, and she favored Cumshaw with a little smile of gratitude. She never smiled at me like that, not even in those far-away days when we were all the world to each other or thought we were. Which in the end amounts to much the same thing.
"Well, if you don't mind," said Cumshaw, breaking an awkward silence, "I'll go home now and think matters over. And then to-morrow we'll decide what to do."
"Home?" I echoed. "I thought——" And then I stopped.
"I'm staying in town," he said with a smile. "That's what I meant when I said home."
"In that case," I said, "you'll be handy whenever we want you. You'd better leave your address in case we want you in a hurry."
He scribbled his address—a leading city hotel—on a blank card and handed it to me. I glanced at it and then thrust it into my pocket. When I looked up again he was holding Moira's hand in his, just a trifle longer than convention demanded I thought, and saying something to her that I did not catch. She smiled in return, a dazzling smile, and said quite distinctly, "Please call whenever you feel inclined. There is no need for us to stand on ceremony with each other now we're partners."