“References are quite useless. It is as I say, and I am not guessing when I assert to you that Violet has a penchant for this man—a most dangerous penchant, which can lead to nothing but disaster, if it be not now scotched in the bud. I demand it as my right, and I beseech it as a friend, that she never see him again.”
“Yet it is all most strange. I think you exaggerate. Violet’s fancies are not errant.”
“Well, say that I exaggerate. But you will at least sympathize, Mrs. Mordaunt, with my sense of the acute danger of your further stay in London at present—”
“I think you make a mountain of a molehill, Mr. Van Hupfeldt,” said Mrs. Mordaunt with some dryness, “and I am sorry now that I have promised not to speak with Violet on the subject. Of course, I recognize your right to have your say and your way, but as for leaving London to-day at a moment’s notice, really that can’t be done.”
“Not to oblige me? not to please me?” said he, grasping the old lady’s hand with a nervous intensity of gesture that almost startled her.
“We might go to-morrow,” she admitted.
“But if they correspond or meet to-night?”
“Well, you are a lover, of course; but you shouldn’t start at shadows. Here is Violet herself.”
“Leave us a little, will you?” whispered Van Hupfeldt, rising to meet the girl in his impulsive foreigner’s way, but, forgetting his wounded leg, he had to stop short with a face of pain.