A spark lit itself in her eyes.
“I wonder you didn’t send your groom instead,” she flashed out quickly. “It would have saved you the trouble.”
Coventry was silent a moment, while a slow flush rose under his sun-tanned skin.
“I think perhaps I deserved that,” he admitted at last. His glance met and held hers. “Will you at any rate try to believe I had a good reason for doing what I did?”
She hesitated.
“But—then why have you come now? What’s happened to the ‘good reason’?”
“I’ve scrapped it,” he said tersely. Then, almost as though he were arguing the matter out with himself, he added: “A man can take risks if he likes—if the game’s worth the candle.”
“And—is this particular game—worth the candle?”
A sudden smile broke up the gravity of those deep, unhappy eyes of his.
“I can’t answer that question—yet.”