"I expect you are tired too," he said, "only—as usual—you wait up for me."
The Warden poured himself out a cup of coffee, and took up a sandwich, adding: "I managed to get a scrappy dinner before seven; if I had waited longer I should have missed my train."
"We were very dull at dinner without you," she said, bringing him back again to the point from which she was starting.
The Warden looked pleased, and then pained. Lady Dashwood was watching him with keen tired eyes.
"We lunched at Chartcote, and then we did all that you particularly wanted me to do," she said. "And then something rather amazing happened—I found a letter waiting me from Belinda Scott!"
She paused. The Warden glanced at her: his face became coldly abstracted.
"I don't mean that it was strange that she should write, but that what she said was strange."
He glanced at her again, and she saw that he was arrested. She went on. It seemed now easier to speak. A strange cold despair had seized her, and with that despair a fearlessness.
"I can't help thinking that there is some mistake, because you would have told me if—well, anything had happened to you—of consequence! You would not have left me to be told by an—an outsider."
The Warden raised the cup of coffee to his lips, and then put it down carefully.