"You will return to be my critic."
"I may never return."
"Never return! my dear lady, you could not possibly desert Melbourne Hall. The very stones would cry out upon you."
"Oh," she said, looking straight into his face; "my husband may not like England, you know."
"I will believe it when he has the courage to tell me so."
"Men are generally courageous when it is a question of telling a woman what they do not like. I am to live in Bukharest, be it known. My summers will be spent in the Carpathians. I shall become a child of the primitive colors—the red, the blue, and the orange—which Menie Muriel Dowie tells us are an eternal delight to the eyes. I am promised glorious weeks on the Black Sea, and more glorious weeks on seas which are not black. The sun is always shining there—why should one want to come back to England?"
Had anyone asked Evelyn why she spoke in this way to a stranger, a man of whose existence she had hardly been aware yesterday, she would certainly have been unable to give a satisfactory answer. To no other in all her life had she spoken so openly and so readily as to this fair-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, who did not appear to have one grain of humbug in all his body. Her surprise was not greater than her pleasure; she would not deny that it pleased her thus to confess intimate thoughts which she had not shared even with her own father. Gavin, upon his part, a servant of candor always, observed nothing unusual in her freedom; but he could ask himself already if she were in love with the man to whom her future was pledged.
"We are forgetting how to be serious," he rejoined; "that is also one of the vices of the age. People chatter away as though words were enough and the truth of words nothing at all. You do not mean anything you say, and you expect me to listen to you in the same spirit. I decline to do so. If you go to Bukharest, you will come back again before the year is out. As for the blue, red and orange, well, I could as soon imagine you buying an early Victorian sideboard. That is my frank opinion. You must forgive me if it offends?"
He looked straight into her eyes and she did not turn away. Gavin Ord was unlike any man she had known—not by mere cleverness alone, but by that strength of will and character which could not fail to assert itself in any company, whatever its nature. Here sat one whom, were he to command her, she would certainly obey. Such a possibility of docility astonished Evelyn beyond measure—but it also encouraged her to put a question to him.
"Frank opinions need no forgiveness," she said. "I am longing for more, Mr. Ord. You told me last night that you believed you had met me in London. Please tell me where it was."