He nodded.  “Tea?” he asked, “or coffee?” For the hotel servant had come for his orders.

“Tea, please,” she said; “and—­and this time I will not ask for the bill.”  The faintest flicker of a smile crossed her lips, and then was gone, and he thought that in its place a look of weariness and unhappiness came into the girl’s face.

She had sent for him to ask his help.  His letter had only reached her that morning, and when she had read it, she had asked herself, “Shall I go?  Shall I see him?” And had answered “No!  It is over; I do not need his help now.  I have someone else to whom I must turn for help, someone who will give it readily.”

And yet she had come—­that is the way of women.  And because she had come, she would still ask his help, and not ask it of that other.  For surely he who had brought all this trouble on to her should be the one to clear her path?

The waiter brought the tea, and Hugh leaned back and watched her as she poured it out.  And, watching her, there came to him a vision of the bright morning room at Hurst Dormer, a vision of all the old familiar things he had known since boyhood:  and in that vision, that day-dream, he saw her sitting where his mother once had sat, and she was pouring out tea, even as now.

A clearer, stronger vision this than any he had had in the old days of Marjorie.  He smiled at the thought of those dreams, so utterly broken and dead and wafted away into the nothingness of which they had been built.

“You sent for me to help you?”

“Yes!” A tinge of colour rose in her cheeks and waxed till her cheeks and even her throat were flooded with a brilliant, glorious flush, and then, suddenly as it had come, it died away again, leaving her whiter than before.

“I wanted your help.  I felt that I had a right to ask it, seeing that you—­you—­”

“Have caused you trouble and annoyance?  You wrote that,” he said.

She bowed her head.

“What you did, has brought more trouble, more shame, more annoyance to me than I can ever explain.  I do not ask you to tell me why you did it—­it was cruel and mean, unmanly; but you did it.  And it can never be undone, so I ask for no reasons, no explanations.  They—­they do not interest me now.  You have brought me trouble and—­even danger—­and so I turned to you, to ask your help.  I have the right, have I not the right—­to demand it?”

“The greatest right on earth,” he said.  “Joan, how can I help you?”

But she did not answer immediately, for the answer would be difficult.

“When you played with a woman’s name,” she said, “you played with the most fragile, the most delicate and easily breakable thing there is.  Do you realise that?  A woman’s fair name is her most sacred possession, and yet you played with mine, used it for your own purpose, and so have brought me to shame and misery.”

“Joan,” he leaned towards her, “how—­how—­tell me how?”