“I suppose I am an idiot,” she acknowledged, “but that man terrifies me.”

“In what way?”

“He is my husband’s associate in business.”  Josephine said, “and apparently desires to take advantage of that fact.  My husband is not a reliable person where money is concerned.  He seems to have been behaving rather badly.”

“I am very sorry,” Wingate murmured.

She looked at him curiously.

“Has anything happened?” she asked.  “You seem distressed.”

Wingate shook his head.  The shock of having met his enemy under such circumstances was beginning to pass.

“Forgive me,” he begged.  “The fact of it is, the last person I expected to find here was Peter Phipps.  I forgot that your husband was connected with his company.”

“You two are not friends?” she suggested.

“We are bitter enemies,” Wingate confessed, “and shall be till one of us goes down.  We are a very terrible example of the evils of this age of restraint.  In more primitive days we should have gone for one another’s throats.  One would have lived and the other died.  It would have been, better.”

Josephine shivered.

“Don’t!” she implored.  “You sound too much in earnest.”

“I am in earnest about that man,” he replied gravely.  “I beg you, Lady Dredlinton, as I hope to call myself your friend, not to trust him, not to encourage him to visit you, to keep him always at arm’s length.”

“And I,” she answered, holding out her hand, “as I hope and mean to be—­as I am your friend—­promise that I will have no more to do with him than the barest courtesy demands.  To tell you the truth, your coming this afternoon was a little inopportune.  If you had been a single minute later, I honestly believe that he would have said unforgivable things.”

Wingate’s eyes flashed.

“If I could have heard him!” he muttered.

“But, dear friend, you could have said nothing nor done anything,” she reminded him soothingly.  “Remember that although we are a little older friends than many people know of, we still have some distance to go in understanding.”

“I want to be your friend, and I want to be your friend quickly,” he said doggedly.

“No one in the world needs friends as I do,” Josephine answered, “because I do not think that any one is more lonely.”

“You have changed,” he told her, his eyes full of sympathy.

“Since Etaples?  Yes!  Somehow or other, I was always able to keep cheerful there because there was always so much real misery around, and one felt that one was doing good in the world.  Here I seem to be such a useless person, no good to anybody.”

“If you say things like that, I shall forget how far we have to travel,” he declared.  “I need your friendship.  I have come over here with rather a desperate purpose.  I think I can say that I have never known fear, and yet sometimes I flinch when I think of the next few months.  I want a real friend, Lady Dredlinton.”