"Have you any reason to suppose that Godfrey Pavely was really associated in business with this mysterious man?" he asked.
Looking down into her upturned face he saw a queer little quiver wave across her mouth, that most revealing feature of the face. But she eluded the question. "I did not know much of Godfrey's business interests. He was always very secret about such things."
"She certainly knows there is such a man as Fernando Apra!" he said to himself, but aloud he observed kindly: "I presume Mr. Pavely wrote to you during the early days of his stay in London?"
Katty hesitated. "Yes," she said at last, "I did have a letter from him. But it was only about some business he was doing for me. I was not at Rosedean, Lord St. Amant. I was away on a visit—on two visits."
And then Katty flushed—flushed very deeply.
He quickly withdrew his gaze from her now downcast face, and—came to a quite wrong conclusion. "I see," he said lightly, "you were away yourself, and probably moving about?"
"Yes—yes, I was," she eagerly agreed.
She was feeling a little more comfortable now. Katty knew the great value of truth, though she sometimes, nay generally, behaved as if truth were of no value at all.
In a sense Lord St. Amant had known Katty from her childhood—known her, that is, in the way in which the great magnate of a country neighbourhood, if a friendly, human kind of individual, knows every man, woman and child within a certain radius of his home. He was of course well aware of Mrs. Tropenell's prejudice against Katty, and, without exactly sharing it, he did not look at her with the kindly, indulgent eyes with which most members of his sex regarded the pretty, unfortunate, innocent divorcée, to whom Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey Pavely had been so truly kind.
But now, as the upshot of Katty's murmured confidences, her present host certainly acquired a new interest in, and a new sympathy for, Mrs. Winslow. Of course she had not deceived him as completely as she believed herself to have done, for he felt certain that she knew more of Godfrey Pavely's movements, during the early days of his stay in London a fortnight ago, than she admitted. He was also quite convinced that they had met secretly during their joint absence from home.