They walked on in silence for a while, then. "I think, Dick, that I had better go away."
"No, no!" he cried. "Don't do that, Jane! Believe me, that would be a very unwise thing to do. I take it that you and General Lingard"—he brought out the name of her betrothed with an effort—"have other joint visits to pay?"
She shook her head. "I haven't told anybody. Only the Paches know. He thought he ought to tell them."
"If you go away, Jane, he will almost certainly stay on here. It would be a pity for him to do that," Wantele spoke with studied calmness.
"Yes, I suppose it would," the colour rushed into her face. "I want to tell you something, Dick. Hew was very noble about my brother. I told him about it very soon after we first met one another. You see we became friends so soon——" She sighed. "Just friends, you know."
Wantele turned and looked into her face with an indefinable expression of shamed curiosity—an expression that seemed to ask a thousand questions he had no right to ask.
"And then he began to write to me," she went on rather breathlessly, as if answering some inward questioning of her own rather than of his. "I was amazed when I received his first letter—it seemed such a strange thing for him to write to me, and then he asked if he might come and see me before he went away."
She waited a moment, and went on, "I was the only person to whom he wrote while he was away. He's had a very lonely life, Dick,—no brothers, no sisters, and his mother died when he was a little child."
There was a world of anxious apology, of excuse, underlying her confidences.
When, at last, they went back into the house, they found General Lingard sitting with his host, and it was in Richard Maule's presence that Jane made her request—a request to which Lingard gave eager assent.