"Well," she said, looking at him frankly; "are we going to talk or just exchange civilities?"
"We won't do that," he answered, meeting her look. "Civilities be blowed, anyhow."
"But I 'd like to ask you how you feel, first of all," said Margaret.
"Oh, first-rate. I 'd get up if it wasn't for Jakes," he assured her eagerly. "And I say," he added, with a quick touch of awkwardness, "I hope, really, you haven't been bothering about me, and thinking it was that affair in the drawing-room that made the trouble. Because it wasn't, you know. I 'd felt something of the kind coming on before lunch. Jakes says that running up stairs may have done it—thing I 'm always forgetting I mustn't do. A chap can't always be thinking of his in'ards, can he?"
"No," agreed Margaret.
She recognized a certain tone of politeness, of civil constraint, in his manner of speaking. He was doing his best to be trivial and ordinary, but she could not be deceived.
"It was rotten, though," he went on quickly. "That brute Van Zyl—look here! I 'm most fearfully sorry I wasn't able to put a stop to his talk, Miss Harding. It makes me sick to think of you being badgered by that fellow."
"It didn't hurt me," said Margaret thoughtfully. "All that is nothing. But are n't we being rather civil, after all?"
He made a slight grimace. He looked very frail against the pillows, with his nervous, sun-tanned hands fidgeting on the coverlet. One button of his pyjamas was loose at the throat, and let his lean neck be seen, with the tan stopping short where the collar came and giving place to white skin below.
"Oh, well," he said, in feeble protest. "Why bother?"