“Did you come up without any luggage at all?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I have a dressing-bag and a few things downstairs on a taxicab,” she said.  “I told the man to stop his engine and wait for a time—­until I had seen you,” she added, turning around.

There was a very slight smile upon her lips, the glimmer of something that was almost appealing, in her eyes.  Granet took her hand and patted it kindly.  Her response was almost hysterical.

“It’s very sweet of you to trust me like this,” he said.  “Jarvis will bring you something to eat, then I’ll take you round to your aunt’s.  Where is it she lives—­somewhere in Kensington, isn’t it?  Tomorrow we must talk things over.”

She threw herself back once more in the easy-chair and glanced around her.

“I should like,” she decided, “to talk them over now.”

He glanced towards the door.

“Just as you please,” he said, “only Jarvis will be in with your sandwiches directly.”

She brushed aside his protest.

“I was obliged,” she continued, “to say that I was engaged to you, to save you from something—­I don’t know what.  The more I have thought about it, the more terrible it has all seemed.  I am not going to even ask you for any explanation.  I—­I daren’t.”

Granet looked at his cigarette for a moment thoughtfully.  Then he threw it into the fire.

“Perhaps you are wise,” he said coolly.  “All the same, when the time comes there is an explanation.”

“It is the present which has become such a problem,” she went on.  “I was driven to leave home and I don’t think I can go back again.  Father is simply furious with me, and every one about the place seems to have an idea that I am somehow to blame for what happened the other night.”

“That seems to me a little unjust,” he protested.

“It isn’t unjust at all,” she replied brusquely.  “I’ve told them all lies and I’ve got to pay for them.  I came to you—­well, there really wasn’t anything else left for me to do, was there?  I hope you don’t think that I am horribly forward.  I am quite willing to admit that I like you, that I liked you from the first moment we met at Lady Anselman’s luncheon.  At the same time, if that awful night hadn’t changed everything, I should have behaved just like any other stupidly and properly brought-up young woman—­waited and hoped and made an idiot of myself whenever you were around, and in the end, I suppose, been disappointed.  You see, fate has rather changed that.  I had to invent our engagement to save you—­and here I am,” she added, with a little nervous laugh, turning her head as the door opened.

Jarvis entered with the sandwiches and arranged them on a small table by her side.  Granet poured out the wine for her, mixed himself a whiskey-and-soda and took a sandwich also from the plate.

“Now tell me,” he began, as soon as Jarvis had disappeared, “what is there at the back of your mind about my presence there at Market Burnham that night?”