“Oh, perhaps—seen some one who has startled you?”
“I have told you it is nothing,” she answered curtly. “Be good enough to leave me.”
But he merely paused an instant in obedience to the gesture of her hand, then he resumed his place beside her. In the tone of one who had made up his mind to be frank—
“Look here, miss,” he said, “it is better to come to an understanding here, where there is nobody to listen. If it is not that somebody has been rude to you, I’m clear that you have heard news, or you have seen somebody. And it is my business to know the one or the other.”
She stopped.
“I have nothing to do with your business!” she cried.
He made a wry face, and spread out his hands in appeal.
“Won’t you be frank?” he replied. “Come, miss? What is the use of fencing with me? Be frank! I want to make things easy for all. Lord, miss, you are not the sort, and we two know it, that suffers in these things. You’ll come out all right if you’ll be frank. It’s that I’m working towards; to put an end to it, and the sooner the better. You can’t—a wife and four children, miss, and a radical to boot—you can’t think much of him! So why not help instead of hindering?”
“You are impudent!” Henrietta said, with a fine colour in her cheeks. “Be good enough to let me pass.”
“If I knew where he was”—with his eyes on her face—“I could make all easy. All done, and nothing said, my lady; just ‘from communications received,’ no names given, not a word of what has happened up here! Lord bless you, what do they care in London—and it is in London he’ll be tried—what happens here!”