"On having done a good deed."
"A good deed?"
"Didn't I tell you there was nothing I wouldn't do for Frida Tancred?"
Incomparable cunning! To set herself right in his eyes and her own, she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the Colonel for his daughter's sake. A good deed! Well, whatever else she had done, and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had set Frida Tancred free. Nevertheless, he could not be pleasant.
"Self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the line——"
"Does one?"
He felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light touch. "Mr. Durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful."
"I don't see it."
"Don't you see what I have done for you?" There was a strange light behind the pince-nez as she smiled up into his face. "I have cleared the way."
"For Miss Tancred, you mean," said Durant; thereby proving that in her calculations as to his mean density Mrs. Fazakerly was not altogether wrong.