“But she asked you!”
“She asked both of us. I shall certainly not go back alone.”
“Really, I wish you would! Go back and—and see Beryl home.”
He looked at her in astonishment.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that! There was no suggestion—I couldn’t do that, really. I wonder you ask me to. Well—”
She took her hand away from the door and he shut it. But he remained beside it—did not give the chauffeur her address.
“Why won’t you let me take you back?” he said. “I don’t understand.”
She smiled, and he thought it was the saddest smile he had ever seen.
“One is only a bore to others when one is ill,” she said. “Good-bye. Tell the man, please.”
He obeyed her, then took off his hat. His face was grim and perplexed. As she was driven away in the night she gave him a strange look; tragic and pleading, he thought, a look that almost frightened him, that sent a shiver through him.