"Vincent!" she said, in an appealing, half-reproachful fashion.
And then she said—
"I want you to come into the house for a few minutes—I must speak with you."
"Is there any use?" he asked, rather coldly.
However, she was very much embarrassed, as her heightened colour showed; and he could not keep her standing here in Piccadilly; he said 'Very well,' and followed her up the steps and into the house. When they had got into the drawing-room she shut the door behind them, and began at once—with not a little piteous agitation in her manner.
"Vin, this is too dreadful! Can nothing be done? Why are you so implacable? I suppose you don't understand what you have been to me, always, and how I have looked to your future as something almost belonging to me, something that I was to be proud of; and now that it is all likely to come true, you go and make a stranger of yourself! When I see your name in the papers, or hear you spoken of at a dinner-table—it is someone who is distant from me, as if I had no concern with him any longer. People come up to me and say 'Oh, I heard your nephew speak at the Mansion House the other afternoon,' or 'I met your nephew at the Foreign Office last night;' and I cannot say 'Don't you know; he has gone and made himself a stranger to us—?'"
"I wonder who it was who made a stranger of me!" he interposed—but quite impassively.
"I can only say, again and again, that it was done for the best, Vin!" she answered him. "The mistake I made was in letting you know. But I took it for granted that as soon as you were told that those people had accepted money from us to go away—"
"Those people? What people?" he demanded, with a sterner air.
"Oh, I meant only Mr. Bethune himself," said she, hastily. "Oh, yes, certainly, only him; there were no negotiations with any one else."