“I did it,” said Tommy, remorsefully.

“In my absence?” she asked.

“When you were with me on the veranda.”

Her eyes opened to their widest, so surprised that the lashes had no time for their usual play.

“Was that what you call making love, Mr. Sandys?” she inquired.

“I call a spade a spade.”

“And now you are apologizing to me, I understand?”

“If you can in the goodness of your heart forgive me, Lady Pippinworth—­”

“Oh, I do,” she said heartily, “I do.  But how stupid you must have thought me not even to know!  I feel that it is I who ought to apologize.  What a number of ways there seem to be of making love, and yours is such an odd way!”

Now to apologize for playing a poor part is one thing, and to put up with the charge of playing a part poorly is quite another.  Nevertheless, he kept his temper.

“You have discovered an excellent way of punishing me,” he said manfully, “and I submit.  Indeed, I admire you the more.  So I am paying you a compliment when I whisper that I know you knew.”

But she would not have it.  “You are so strangely dense to-night,” she said.  “Surely, if I had known, I would have stopped you.  You forget that I am a married woman,” she added, remembering Pips rather late in the day.

“There might be other reasons why you did not stop me,” he replied impulsively.

“Such as?”

“Well, you—­you might have wanted me to go on.”

He blurted it out.

“So,” said she slowly, “you are apologizing to me for not going on?”

“I implore you, Lady Pippinworth,” Tommy said, in much distress, “not to think me capable of that.  If I moved you for a moment, I am far from boasting of it; it makes me only the more anxious to do what is best for you.”

This was not the way it had shaped during dinner, and Tommy would have acted wisely had he now gone out to cool his head.  “If you moved me?” she repeated interrogatively; but, with the best intentions, he continued to flounder.

“Believe me,” he implored her, “had I known it could be done, I should have checked myself.  But they always insist that you are an iceberg, and am I so much to blame if that look of hauteur deceived me with the rest?  Oh, dear Lady Disdain,” he said warmly, in answer to one of her most freezing glances, “it deceives me no longer.  From that moment I knew you had a heart, and I was shamed—­as noble a heart as ever beat in woman,” he added.  He always tended to add generous bits when he found it coming out well.

“Does the man think I am in love with him?” was Lady Disdain’s inadequate reply.

“No, no, indeed!” he assured her earnestly.  “I am not so vain as to think that, nor so selfish as to wish it; but if for a moment you were moved——­”

“But I was not,” said she, stamping her shoe.

His dander began to rise, as they say in the north; but he kept grip of politeness.