“I suppose I must. Yes, I—well, I’ll promise for the present anyhow,” I said.
“Not to leave this room before my return?” she said.
“Not to leave this room before you return,” I repeated.
Then she left us, and we sat looking at each other like a pair of fools.
“Well,” Faulkner said. “If you can be rude to a pretty girl like that, Ashton, I can’t, and I don’t intend to be. Besides, if Vera is here, Gladys may be here also!”
“I thought you said you are engaged to be married?”
“I did. And I am. But I don’t see why, for that reason, you need call me a fool for being ordinarily polite to another woman, or to any woman, especially if we are to meet Vera.”
“You quite mistake my meaning,” I said. “I say we are a pair of fools—I am more to blame perhaps than you—for being coerced by a chit of a girl into promising to stay here, as though we were a pair of schoolboys put ‘on their honour.’ It is downright silly, to say the least. Yet we must not break our parole—eh?”
I liked Faulkner. His spirit, and his way of saying what he thought amused me. One meets so few men nowadays with pluck enough to say what they really think and mean.
The young girl, whose name was Violet—Violet de Coudron—spread the white cloth, laid the table, and herself brought in our déjeuner. What position did she occupy in the house, we both wondered. Surely there must be servants, and yet... where was Vera?