“She refused you?” exclaimed Sophy, beholding in one comprehensive glance this charming house in Tite Street, the Manor, and all its belongings dead and alive, together with this remarkably handsome and agreeable man to whom these things belonged! “She refused you! Why, what a preposterous minx she must be!”
“Yes, that’s the word, Miss Marchant. It seems preposterous, doesn’t it, that a Venetian peasant, with only her voice and good looks—and the hazardous fortunes of an opera singer—should refuse an English gentleman with a handsome rent-roll. But the thing is true all the same. She refused me. Can you guess why?”
“I can only imagine that she is a brainless idiot,” said Sophy, feeling that she might be tempted to take out her bonnet pin and run it into that vivid face, if it were not for the glass which protected the picture.
She was too angry with Signora Vivanti for having won Mr. Sefton’s affections to be grateful to her for having refused his hand.
“There is always a reason for everything,” said Sefton, after a backward glance at the other room, which showed him that there was no one near enough or unoccupied enough to overhear or observe him; the banjoist being still the centre of attraction, and everybody grouped about him in the neighbourhood of the piano. “There is always a reason if one will only look for it. Signora Vivanti refused me because she was in love with another man, the man she knew and loved in Venice, the man who brought her to London and established her in the house she occupies, and had her trained for the stage. Forgive me, Miss Marchant, if I go a step further and say the man who is the father of her son!”
Sophy drew herself up with an offended air, and flashed an angry look at him.
“You have no right to talk to me in this way, Mr. Sefton. I don’t understand why you should select me for your confidante,” she said icily, moving towards the next room.
“Pray forgive me. You are clever and sympathetic. I have no sister, and in certain crises of life a man feels the need of a woman’s sympathy. And then there were other reasons; or at least there was another reason.”
He stopped, embarrassed, looking at her with a curious hesitation; looking from her to the group by the piano, where Eve’s face shone out among the rest, smiling at the American’s last ebullition.
“You are hinting at something dreadful,” Sophy said, with a scared look. “Do you mean that the man is—is some one I know?”