"You fell out of an aeroplane!—then you were the ghost, Mr. Benson?"
He nodded his head.
"Yes, I'm the ghost, but I don't want anyone to know it just yet. There's a prize of ten thousand offered for a flight down the Simplon Valley and over the big mountains. My machine would have won it if I hadn't come down last night. There's where luck figures. I don't think I can be ready now, and I suppose Paulhan or Bleriot will get it. But I wanted an Englishman to win, and I believe I have the machine. It's not like anybody else's—something different altogether. They tell me I look just like a double-headed eagle when I'm up. That's true, I suppose, for my machine is a bit of a curiosity in its way. You wouldn't understand, perhaps, but if you will come to the chalet sometime, I'll show you. You ought to come just to see an extraordinary thing—and that's a priest with his cassock tucked up, working like one of the best. I left him there when I came along; and, just by the way, I met a man I knew outside the hotel door—Sir Luton Delayne, of Holmswell. We were talking about him last night, you'll remember?"
She flushed scarlet.
"Yes," she said in a low voice, "he is my husband—he has been here to-night."
Benny drew a little nearer still.
"You will forgive me for what I said last night, Lady Delayne. I ought to have known; my good sense should have told me. What I really came here for was not to excuse myself, but to ask your forgiveness. A man should never speak all that is in his mind to anybody except himself. When he begins to judge other people, he is putting a fool's cap on his head. I am old enough to have learned that lesson, and I think shame to have forgotten it. Will you let me say as much to-night?"
She answered him with wondering eyes which declared her perplexity. There is an elementary simplicity of thought and character which women find irresistible, and Benny was the possessor of it. To such a man, women impart strange confidences. Lily needed all her self-control.
"There is no need to say anything," she rejoined with an effort, "men will be judged when they invite judgment. I am sure you meant no harm, and intention is all that matters."
And then, with a shrug of her shoulders and a want of sequence entirely feminine, she exclaimed: