He leaned over her chair, took her hands in his and looked into her eyes.

“Honestly,” he asked, “do you need any assurance?”

“That is the funny part of it,” she laughed.  “Since I am here, since I have seen you, I don’t feel that I do, but downstairs I had quite a horrid little pain.”

“You will never have occasion to feel it again,” he told her.  “I met Miss Flossie Lane last night for the first time at the supper party to which Roger Kendrick took me.  I was placed next to her, and somehow or other she seems to have convinced herself that I invited her to lunch to-day.”

“And you?”

“To be perfectly honest I can’t remember having done anything of the sort.  However, what was I to do?”

“What you did, of course.  That is finished.  Now tell me about that supper party.  What happened?  Was Dredlinton really rude to you?”

“Your husband was drunk,” Wingate answered.  “He was rude to everybody.”

“And what was the end of it?”

“I carried him out of the room and locked him up,” he told her.

She laughed softly.

“I can see you doing it,” she declared.  “Are you as strong as you look, Mr. John Wingate?”

“I am certainly strong enough to carry you away and lock you up if you don’t call me John,” he replied.

“John, then,” she said.  “I don’t mind calling you John.  I like it.  How fortunate,” she went on lazily, “that we really did get to know one another well in those days at Etaples.  It saves one from all those twinges one feels about sudden friendships, for you know, after all, in a way, nothing at Etaples counted.  You were just the most charming of my patients, and the most interesting, but still a patient.  Here, you simply walk into my life and take me by storm.  You make a very foolish woman of me.  If I had to say to myself, ‘Why, I have known him less than a week!’ it would hurt my pride horribly.”

“Blessed little bit of shell that found a temporary shelter in my arm!” he exclaimed.  “All the same, I feel just as you do.  Out there, for all your graciousness, you were something sacred, something far away.”

“And here?” she whispered.

“Shall I tell you?” he asked, with a sudden fire in his eyes.

“For heaven’s sake, no!” she begged, thrusting out her hands.  “I’m afraid to think—­afraid of actual thoughts.  Don’t let us give form to anything.  Let me be content to just feel this new warmth in my life.”

She leaned back in her chair with a contented sigh.  A little tug came snorting up the river.  Even the roar of the traffic over Waterloo Bridge seemed muffled and disintegrated by the breeze which swept on its way through the rustling lime trees.

“You are wonderfully situated here,” she went on.  “I don’t believe it is London at all.  It rests me more than any place I have been in for a long time, and yet—­at the same time—­I think that it is going to make me sad.”