We had been such intimate friends that even my five years’ absence abroad had not built up a barrier between us.
“I wonder if it is Miss Bassett?” he said, looking at me earnestly.
“But was she a great friend of yours?” I said. “If Lady Inley’s description of her is accurate, I can hardly imagine so.”
“Vere doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Then Miss Bassett——”
“Oh, she does look like that; dried up, unemotional, tame, English, even comic.”
“The regular spinster, eh?”
“She looks it. But, damn it all, Vere has no business to say she has no emotions, to wonder why such people are born. But she doesn’t know—Vere doesn’t know.”
His agitation grew, and was inexplicable to me. But I knew Inley, knew that he was bound to tell me what was on his mind. He could be reserved, but not with me. So I took a cigar, cut the end off it deliberately, struck a match, lighted it, and began to smoke in silence. He followed my example quickly, and then said:
“Vere talks like that, and, but for Miss Bassett, Vere would have been murdered two years ago.”