She drew farther back. "I'm not thinking of myself," she said, "I'm thinking of you."
She was no longer like a child. Her voice had suddenly grown older.
"Are you?" he said. "Then you'll do what I ask you." He held her with his arm and drew her, resisting and unresisting, close to him.
"Ah," she cried, "what are you going to do with me?"
"I am going," he said, "to take you to my sister."
And he went with her, up the steps and into the lighted vestibule, past the hall-porter and the clerk in his bureau and the manager's wife in hers, straight into the lounge, before the Colonel and his wife, and he led her to Jane where she sat in her place beside the hearth.
"It isn't half such a bad night as it looks," said he in a clear voice. "Is it, Mrs. Tailleur?"
CHAPTER X
FIVE minutes later Lucy was talking to Colonel and Mrs. Hankin, with genial unconcern. They never knew that he knew what they had been saying, or how their tongues had scourged Mrs. Tailleur out into the lash of the rain. They never knew that the young man who conversed with them so amiably was longing to take the Colonel by his pink throat and throttle him, nor that it was only a higher chivalry that held him from this disastrous deed. The Colonel merely felt himself in the presence of an incomparable innocence; but whether it was Lucy who was innocent, or Mrs. Tailleur, or the two of them together, he really could not say.