Her lips were lifted to his.  He bent and kissed her.  But as he went gravely away she had a feeling that she had disappointed him, and her heart grew a little heavier in consequence.

The sound of the piano in the drawing-room brought her down earlier than usual for dinner, and she found Bertrand playing softly to himself in the twilight.  He had a delicate touch, and she always loved to hear him.

She had with difficulty trained him not to spring up at her entrance, but to-day he turned sharply round.

“Christine, what did that scelerat say to you?”

The abruptness of his speech did not disconcert her.  She was never ill at ease with Bertrand, however sudden his mood.  She came to the piano, and stood facing him in the dusk.

“He recognized me,” she said.

“Ah!” Bertrand’s exclamation was deep in his throat, like the growl of an angry dog.  “And he said—?”

Chris hesitated.

Instantly his manner changed.  He stretched out a quick hand.  “Pardon my impatience!  You will tell me what he said?”

Yet still she hesitated.  His impetuosity had warned her to go warily if she would not have him embroiling himself in another quarrel for her sake.

“It doesn’t matter much, does it?” she said, rather wearily.  “I wasn’t with him very long—­no longer than I could help.  He was objectionable, of course, but that sort of man couldn’t be anything else, could he?”

“Tell me what he said,” insisted Bertrand inexorably.

But still she hedged, trying to temper his wrath.  “He didn’t tell me anything new.  I have known—­for some time now—­why you fought that duel.”

“Ah!  You know that?  But how?”

She smiled wanly.  “You forget I’m growing up, Bertie.”

He winced at that suddenly and sharply, but he made no verbal protest.  Only in the silence that followed there was something passionate, something which she never remembered to have encountered before in her dealings with him.

At the end of a long pause he spoke, with obvious constraint.  “And you will not tell me what he said?”

“Is it worth while?” said Chris.  “I daresay we shall never see him again.”

“He insulted you, no?” said Bertrand.

She yielded, half-involuntarily, to his persistence.  “He made some—­rather horrid—­insinuations.  He spoke of the duel and of what happened at Valpre.  And he asked—­he asked if—­Trevor knew.”

A fierce oath burst headlong from Bertrand, the first she had ever heard him utter.  He apologized for it instantly, almost in the same breath, but she was startled by the violence of it none the less, so startled that she decided then and there that, if she would keep the peace between him and his enemy, she must confide in him no further.

“But that was really all,” she hastened to assure him.  “I left him then, and—­and I think we had better forget it, Bertie.  Promise me you will.”