The rich, surging color came swiftly into her face, as wine seen through something dark and transparent.  Her black eyes shone like jet.  She would have looked tragic had it not been for her fixed, steady smile.

“Have I ever been anything else with you?”

“No.  You’ve been straight as a die.  I’ll say that for you.  You’ve been a good pal—­a devilish good pal!  But over here—­in America—­everything seems to go by enigmas—­and puzzles—­and surprises—­”

“I’ll explain what I can to you,” she said, with a heightened color, “but it won’t be so very easy.  There are lots of people who, feeling as I do—­toward Olivia—­and—­and toward you—­would want to beat about the bush.  But when all these things began to happen—­and you were already on the way—­I turned everything over in my mind and decided to speak exactly as I think.”

“Good!”

“But it isn’t so very easy,” she repeated, pretending to rearrange the dahlia in her laces, so as to find a pretext for not looking him in the eyes.  “It isn’t so very easy; and if—­later on—­in after years perhaps—­when everything is long over—­it ever strikes you that I didn’t play fair—­it’ll be because I played so fair that I laid myself open to that imputation.  One can, you know.  I only ask you to remember it.  That’s all.”

Ashley was bewildered.  He could follow little more than half of what she said.  “More mysteries,” he was sighing to himself as she spoke.  “And such a color!  That’s her strong point.  Pity it only comes by fits and flashes.  But, good Lord, what a country!  Always something queer and new.”

“Good-by,” she said, offering her hand before he had time to emerge from his meditations.  “We shall see you to-morrow evening.  And, by the way, we dine at half-past seven.  We’re country people here, and primitive.  No; don’t come to the gate.  Olivia must be wondering where you are.”

He looked after her as she tripped over the lawn toward the roadway, still holding her long-handled, beribboned, eighteenth-century sunshade with the daintiness of a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook.

“She’s a good ’un,” he said to himself.  “Straight as a die, she is—­and true as steel.”

None the less he was glad when she left him.

XVI

Ashley wanted to be alone.  He needed solitude in order to face the stupendous bit of information Mrs. Fane had given him.  Everything else he had heard during the past twenty-four hours he had felt himself more or less competent to meet.  True, his meeting it would be at a sacrifice and the probable loss of some of the best things he had hoped and worked for; but he should have the satisfaction that comes to every man of honor when he has done a brave thing well.  There would be something, too, in giving the lie to people who accused him of having no thought but for his own advancement.  He had been sensitive to that charge, because of the strain of truth in it, and yet had seen no means of counteracting it.  Very well; he should counteract it now.