He turned slowly towards her. His eyes rested upon her face, severely critical, she thought. "My conversation can be of very little interest to you, Miss Leigh, I fear. We live quite out of the world at Savlinsky."
"But," said Rona, battling with a most unusual sensation of being snubbed, "the news we last heard of you was such as to cause us profound anxiety"—she snipped her sentence off short, because of the satirical curve of the young man's lips.
"That is surprising, though gratifying," he said, with irony. "But I have no adventures to recount to you. I have spent the last month and more in prison."
Rona was startled out of her attitude of reserve. "In prison!" she cried in horror.
"Again—you were about to add," he suggested with a sneer.
She quivered at the unjust taunt. But she dared not reproach him. She dare not trench upon any subject which would unlock the past. Her letter lay like an iron bar between them. She guessed that he felt it as strongly as she did.
"Do you wish not to tell me anything about it?" she asked with quiet pride, when she had swallowed her feeling.
"I am really more than sorry to have given poor Denzil another false scare," said Felix. "By the way, I hardly like to ask it—but do you object to my smoking?"
"Of course not," she said, impatiently.
"I was forgetting. Perhaps you will join me?" he went on, with elaborate politeness, offering a silver box of cigarettes.