On reaching home, however, Miss Le Mesurier immediately wrote out the note which she had begun in Mrs. Willoughby’s boudoir.  She wrote it now without hesitation, as though she had composed the form of its message while in the company of Conway, and addressed it to Stephen Drake.  She had a question to ask him, she stated, of some importance to herself.  Would he call on Thursday afternoon and answer it?  Clarice read through the note before she sealed up the envelope.  The word importance caught her eye, and she pondered over it for a moment.  She crossed it out finally and substituted interest.  Then she sent her letter to the post.  At breakfast on the Thursday morning, Clarice casually informed her father of Drake’s visit.  ‘I wrote to him, asking him to call,’ she added.

Mr. Le Mesurier looked up from the pages of his Times.  ‘Why?’ he asked quickly.

‘I want him to tell me something.’

The Times crackled in his hands and fluttered to the floor.  He opened his mouth to speak and thought better of it, and repeated the action more than once.  Then he scratched his head with a helpless air, and picked up his newspaper.  ‘Silly girl!’ he said at last; ‘silly girl!’ and relapsed into silence.  At the close of breakfast, however, he made an effort at expostulation.  ‘You will make the man believe you’re in love with him,’ he said, and in fact he could have chanced on no happier objection to present to her.  Clarice flushed to the temples.  Sidney Mallinson, Mrs. Willoughby, and now her father!  All three had made the same suggestion, and the repetition of it vexed her pride.  There were others they might have said it of with more appearance of truth, she thought:  Sidney Mallinson himself, for instance, or even Percy Conway.  But he, Drake!  For a moment she felt inclined to telegraph to him telling him not to come.  Then she thought of the motive which had induced her to send for him.  No!  She would ask her question that afternoon, and so have done with him for good.  Aloud she answered: 

’How ridiculous!  I should hardly think he has that sort of conceit.  Anyhow, if he has that impression, I will take care that he does not carry it away.’

Mr. Le Mesurier did not pursue the argument, but he gave certain instructions to his butler, and when Drake arrived at the house he was shown into the library.  Mr. Le Mesurier received him.

‘Pull up a chair to the fire,’ he said with an uneasy geniality.  ’I have something to say to you, Drake.  It won’t take long.’

Drake laid down his hat and seated himself opposite to Mr. Le Mesurier.

’My daughter told me this morning, quite spontaneously, of course, that she had asked you to call in order that she might get from you a certain answer to a certain question, and I thought that I had better prepare you for what that question will be.’  He hesitated in his speech, searching for the best way to begin his explanation, and he caught sight of a cigar-box on the mantelshelf above his head.