“You’ve been—unfriendly,” she answered simply.
The eagerness died out of his eyes, replaced by the old brooding unhappiness which Ann had read in them the day she had first seen him at the Montricheux Kursaal.
“Friendship and I have very little to say to each other.” He spoke with a quiet bitterness that was the growth of years. “Friendship implies trust.”
A bell clanged somewhere, but the signal arm fell unheeded by the man and woman whose conversation had so suddenly become charged with a strange new kind of intimacy.
“Then you don’t trust me?” There was a hurt note in Ann’s voice. She was not used to being distrusted.
Coventry smiled ironically, as though at some secret jest of which the edge was turned against himself.
“Sometimes I almost do,” he said. “But on the whole—forgive me!—I haven’t a blind faith in your sex.” He paused, then added rather grimly: “A burnt child fears the fire, and I had my lesson many years ago.”
“So you really deserve your reputation?”
“My reputation?”
“Current gossip sets you down as a confirmed misogynist, you know.”