She put her question, without a single word of preface—purposely to surprise him.
“Mr. Delamayn,” she said, “do you know where Anne Silvester is this morning?”
He was filling his pipe as she spoke, and he dropped some of the tobacco on the floor. Instead of answering before he picked up the tobacco he answered after—in surly self-possession, and in one word—“No.”
“Do you know nothing about her?”
He devoted himself doggedly to the filling of his pipe. “Nothing.”
“On your word of honor, as a gentleman?”
“On my word of honor, as a gentleman.”
He put back his tobacco-pouch in his pocket. His handsome face was as hard as stone. His clear blue eyes defied all the girls in England put together to see into his mind. “Have you done, Miss Lundie?” he asked, suddenly changing to a bantering politeness of tone and manner.
Blanche saw that it was hopeless—saw that she had compromised her own interests by her own headlong act. Sir Patrick’s warning words came back reproachfully to her now when it was too late. “We commit a serious mistake if we put him on his guard at starting.”
There was but one course to take now. “Yes,” she said. “I have done.”