“Mr Auriol!”
“Lettice—Miss Morison, how thankful I am to have found you!”
Lettice’s face, cold as it was, burned.
“Found me!” she repeated. “Have you been sent after me to look for me? There was no need for anything of the kind. I telegraphed yesterday to say I was coming on to—” She hesitated, not sure if she would, to him, say whither she was bound. But her tone was full of resentment.
Godfrey gave a sigh that was half a groan, of something very like despair.
“Will you always misunderstand me?” he said.
“What can I say? What can I do? You seem to think I have a mission in life of annoying and insulting you. What can a man do to prove that he does not deserve to be so thought of?”
Lettice looked at him in amazement, not unmixed with compunction. Was this the calm, stately Mr Auriol? Did he so care for her opinion? She could hardly take it in; and then, by a quick revulsion, she remembered how only the night before she had called him, and felt that he deserved to be called, generous.
“I am sorry for being so hasty,” she said. “But I don’t see why you or any one need have followed me. I wanted,” she went on, and her eyes filled with tears—“I wanted to have done it all myself. It—it was my fault Arthur went away; I wanted to be the one to bring him back.”