For over a minute he did not speak. Then he looked up.
“How in the devil did you find that out?” he asked, abruptly.
“I saw it. Do you mind my warning you?”
“Good gracious, no. It’s—most awfully kind of you. I—I really never thought of such a thing. You see, she was always a great pal of Dudley’s—my eldest brother’s.”
Lady Harden laughed.
“So she seemed too old for—that sort of thing? I see. In fact, I saw from the first, and that is why I ventured—— We have drifted nearly to the willows, by the way.”
He laid his neglected rod in the bottom of the boat, and rowed in silence until his companion resumed, lighting a cigarette, and speaking with easy deliberation between puffs: “She is thirty-four, and—that is not old, nowadays. The Duke of Cornwall is crazy to marry her, by the way.”
“Cornwall!”
“Cornwall. And—there are others. My dear Teddy—may I, a contemporary of Miss—Methuselah—call you Teddy? Are you really so naïf as not to have known?”
It was almost dark, but she could still see the flush that burnt his face at the question.