“And yet it is not my business!”
“What do you mean? Not your business?”
“How can it be my business to ask what lady went to—to his lodgings?”
“But you would have wondered——“
“Yes, I should have wondered. I could not have helped that.”
“Mr. Orange and I have been friends, as you know, for some time. He knew me years ago before he—he met you. I was quite a little girl. I remember I used to hold his hand when I walked in the gardens by his side.”
“He has often spoken of you.”
“But all this does not help us now. If it were ever known that I—I was the one, the other day,—I should be ruined.”
“You may be sure that no one shall know.”
“I am not so selfish as I seem. I don't forget that this story will injure him—injure him terribly. They will think him a kind of Joseph Surface—a hypocrite. People expect him to be different from everybody else. A piece of gossip which they would have laughed at and taken as a matter of course from poor Beauclerk or Charles Aumerle—they would resent bitterly in Robert. The thing that grieves me, that torments me, is the fear lest this act of mine may injure him.”