"You sent for me?" he says, abruptly, noting her sudden shame and confusion with ungenerous malice.
"Yes, I—I——" she pauses, and throws up her girlish white hands as if to ward off a blow. "Oh, do not look at me so," she says, imploringly. "I know what you are thinking and saying to yourself. It is that—that I am bold, forward, unlady-like, to have followed you here, when you," a choking sob, quickly suppressed, "when you despise me so!"
It is his turn to blush now under the dazzling light of the "dark, dark eyes" she opens wide upon his face, while she makes her frantic plaint.
"It is no such thing, pray do not say so," he retorts, fibbing unblushingly, in that he feels himself, to use his own graphic inward phrase, "cornered." "Of course you had a perfect right," dejectedly, "to come after me."
"Not at all," she says, decidedly. "No right that I would presume upon thus far. Oh, Mr. Charteris," with a sudden transition from shame and self-pity to irrepressible mirth, "pray, pray, do not look so dejected and forlorn. I have not come after you, indeed; that is, not as you think. I hope to leave here for America to-morrow."
"Leading me as a captive in your train?" he inquires, not feeling half so bad at the prospect as he could have imagined ten minutes ago.
"Certainly not," she replies, in her frank, decisive way; then, a little frigidly, "pray be seated, sir, and I will unfold to you the business upon which I have followed you to England."
He bows silently, turning a little pale beneath his healthy, florid tinge.
What an ominous sound that dull, prosaic word, "business," has from her lovely, heart-shaped, crimson lips. Besides, he feels, to use his own inward thought again, "wilted." She does not want him, as he has vainly imagined, and ridiculously resented in secret. She is come on a mere matter of business. She makes him understand that thoroughly by her pretty, dignified manner that has stiffened into ice.
"I should not have come—nothing could have induced me to," she goes on, with sensitive deprecation and lowered eyelids, "only for the sake of Maud."