"But why are you here?"
"For several reasons—the chief being to see you, Enid."
For a moment the girl did not reply. This man's movements so often mystified her. He seemed ubiquitous. In one single fortnight he had sent her letters from Paris, Stockholm, Hamburg, Vienna and Constanza. His huge circle of friends was unequalled. In almost every city on the Continent he knew somebody, and he was a perfect encyclopædia of travel. His strange reticence, however, always increased the mystery surrounding him. Those vague whispers concerning him had reached her ears, and she often wondered whether half she heard concerning him was true.
If a man prefers not to speak of himself or of his doings, his enemies will soon invent some tale of their own. And thus it was in Walter's case. Men had uttered foul calumnies concerning him merely because they believed him to be eccentric and unsociable.
But Enid Orlebar, though she somehow held him in suspicion, nevertheless liked him. In certain moods he possessed that dash and devil-may-care air which pleases most women, providing the man is a cosmopolitan.
He was ever courteous, ever solicitous for her welfare.
She had known he loved her ever since they had first met. Indeed, has he not told her so?
As they walked together down that grass-grown byway through the wood, where the brown leaves were floating down with every gust, she glanced into his pale, dark, serious face and wondered. In her nostrils was the autumn perfume of the woods, and as they strode forward in silence a rabbit scuttled from their path.
"You are, no doubt, surprised that I am here," he commenced at last. "But it is in your interests, Enid."
"In my interests?" she echoed. "Why?"