"Your voice."
"Ah," said Paul, to whom others had remarked on this resemblance; "but you had no cause to fear him?—alive, I mean."
"No," replied Flamby, stooping to pick up her sketching materials.
Her monosyllabic reply was not satisfactory; but recognising that if she did not wish to talk about the late Sir Jacques he must merely defeat his own purpose by endeavouring to make her do so, he abandoned the topic.
"My name is Paul Mario," he said, "and I came to see you this morning."
Flamby stood up, paint-box, brushes and sketch in hand. "To see me?"
"Yes! why not?"
Flamby confronted him, her natural self-confidence restored, and studied him with grave grey eyes. "What did you want to see me about?" she asked; and in the tone of the question there was a restrained anxiety which Paul could not understand. Also there was a faint and fascinating suggestion of brogue in her accent.
"About yourself, of course," he replied, and wondered more and more because of the knowledge—borne to him by that acute, almost feminine, intuition which was his—that the girl was fencing with him, and because of her strangeness and her beauty as she stood before him, hair flaming in the sunlight, and her eyes watching him observantly.
Now, her expression changed, and her pupils growing momentarily larger, he knew that her thoughts were in the past—and that they had brought relief from some secret anxiety which had been with her.