I shook my head. "I am not in a hurry, and you are not interrupting.
I thought perhaps—"
"Thought what?"
"That you were in a hurry." I sat down on a footstool near the mantel, and leaned against the latter, my hands on my knees. "I so seldom have a visit from a man in the morning that I don't know how to behave." My head nodded toward the chair he usually preferred.
"I would not take your time now—but I must." He took a seat opposite me, and looking at me, his face changed. "What is the matter? Are you sick? Your eyes look like holes in a blanket. Something has been keeping you awake. What is it?"
"I am not at all sick, and I slept very well last night." I drew a little further from the flame of the fire. "I'm sorry if my eyes—"
"Belie your bluff? They always do. Resist as you will, they give you away. You've been working yourself to death doing absurd things for unthankful people. Who is that sick person downstairs? Where'd you pick her up?"
"I didn't pick her up. She had a hemorrhage and fainted in front of the house. I happened to see her and—and—"
"Had her brought in. I understand. In a neighborhood of this sort you don't know who you're bringing in, but I suppose that doesn't matter."
"No, it doesn't—when the bringing in is a matter of life and death, perhaps! As long as I am here and Mrs. Mundy is here, any one can come in who for the moment has nowhere else to go. Scarborough Square has no walls around its houses. Whoever needs us is a neighbor. The girl was ill."
My voice was indignant. There are times when Selwyn makes me absolutely furious. He apparently takes pleasure in pretending to have no heart. Then, too, he was talking and acting in such contrast to the way I had expected him to talk and act at our first meeting alone after the past weeks, that in amazement I stared at him. Of self-consciousness or embarrassment there was no sign. It had obviously not occurred to him that his acquaintanceship with a girl he had given no evidence of knowing when I was present, and three days later had been seen walking with on the street, absorbed in deep and earnest conversation, was a matter I would like to have explained. The density of men for a moment kept me dumb.