“Blaming me, then,” interrupted Garratt Skinner, with an easy smile.  He was not at all offended.  “Let us say blaming me.  And it was quite natural that you should, judging by the surface.  And there was nothing but the surface for you to judge by.”

While in this way defending Sylvia against her own self-reproach, he only succeeded in making her feel still more that she had judged hastily where she should have held all judgment in abeyance, that she had lacked faith where by right she should have shown most faith.  But he wished to spare her from confusion.

“I was so proud of you that I could not but suffer all the more.  However, don’t let us talk of it, my dear”; and waving with a gesture of the hand that little misunderstanding away forever, he resumed: 

“Well, I am rather fond of Wallie Hine.  I don’t know why, perhaps because he is so helpless, because he so much stands in need of a steady mentor at his elbow.  There is, after all, no accounting for one’s likings.  Logic and reason have little to do with them.  As a woman you know that.  And being rather fond of Wallie Hine, I have tried to do my best for him.  It would not have been of any use to shut my door on Barstow and Archie Parminter.  They have much too firm a hold on the poor youth.  I should have been shutting it on Wallie Hine, too.  No, the only plan was to welcome them all, to play Parminter’s game of showing the youth about town, and Barstow’s game of crude flattery, and gradually, if possible, to dissociate him from his companions, before they had fleeced him altogether.  So you were let in, my dear, for that unfortunate evening.  Of course I was quite sure that you would not attribute to me designs upon Wallie Hine, otherwise I should have turned them all out at once.”

He spoke with a laugh, putting aside, as it were, a quite incredible suggestion.  But he looked at her sharply as he laughed.  Sylvia’s face grew crimson, her eyes for once wavered from his face, and she lowered her head.  Garratt Skinner, however, seemed not to notice her confusion.

“You remember,” he continued, “that I tried to stop them playing cards at the beginning.  I yielded in the end, because it became perfectly clear that if I didn’t they would go away and play elsewhere, while I at all events could keep the points down in my own house.  I ought to have stayed up, I suppose, until they went away.  I blame myself there a little.  But I had no idea they would stay so late.  Are you sure it was their voices you heard and not the servants moving?”

He asked the question almost carelessly, but his eyes rather belied his tone, for they watched her intently.

“Quite sure,” she answered.

“You might have made a mistake.”

“No; for I saw them.”