She threw all that she knew of entreaty into her voice.
“Will you let me give it to you first?”
He hesitated. What a walking lie she was! The black gown that she wore proclaimed an entirely non-existent grief. But, on the other hand, what a very, very juvenile offender she looked! Would it be indulging a culpable curiosity, would it be leading her into fresh falsehoods, to hear by what ingenuity she could gloss over and whiten her abominable behaviour? She saw the momentary weakness of doubt, and plunged.
“You know that our first meeting was purely accidental?”
“Toby told me so.” The return to the familiar nickname was balm to her.
“I had just lost Jock, and he helped me to find him. It was all en règle. He had been presented to me that day—at Tennington.”
Edward did not in the least believe in the accidental meeting, though he did believe that the direct and truthful Toby had been the dupe of its fortuitous character, but all he said was—
“And then?”
“Then—we met again—perhaps not quite so accidentally. I would not let him come here, as he wanted me. I knew that Mrs. Tancred would think it her duty—as, of course, it would have been—to warn Mrs. Aylmer, and the whole thing would have been blued!”
There was a silence. He saw it all. For once she was speaking truth. The poor little waif, seeing the goal of toilettes, diamonds, automobiles ahead of her, and making for it, fighting with all her thief’s weapons of deceit and evasion to reach it before it was removed beyond her grasp. Her next sentence looked as if she had read a part of his thoughts.