“It was not Mr. Aylmer, I think, to whom you were talking in the park last night?”
“Have you been asking him?”
A certain scorn in his eyes at once set her mind at rest on the point, and made her sharply repent of the tell-tale rush of her question.
“If it was not Mr. Aylmer——”
“Why do you call him Mr. Aylmer? I thought to you he was always Toby.”
“If it was not he, who was it?”
“I thought I explained to you that I did not know. I took him for a tramp, but you said that he couldn’t be one, because he wore something—what was it?—that tramps do not wear. I suppose I was too frightened to notice. Anyhow, he was not anybody whom I had ever seen before.” She was lying with inartistic redundancy, and, she also felt, in vain.
“You must have lived with very credulous people,” he said slowly, the contempt in his tone veiled a little by courtesy, and tempered with pity, and so turned towards the door. She fled to intercept him.
“Are you going to tell Mrs. Tancred?”
“No, I think it will be better that you should give her your own version.”