She gave an impatient movement of her head that reminded me of a parrot viciously digging out the kernel of a nut.

“I really can’t say,” she said, pointedly turned to Gordon Hughes, who was on her other side, and asked him if he had played much tennis lately.

I looked round the table for help, but none of the party would meet my eyes, avoiding my glance with a determination that could not be mistaken.  I might have suffered from some loathsome deformity.  Frank, alone, appeared unaware of my innocent appeal for an explanation.  He was bending gloomily over his plate, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts—­though how any man could be gloomy after his recent experience it was beyond me to imagine.

My astonishment flamed into a feeling of acute annoyance.  If any one had spoken to me at that moment, I should have been unforgivably rude.  But no one had the least intention of speaking to me, and I had just sense enough to restrain myself from demanding an apology from the company at large.  That was my natural inclination.  I had been insulted; outraged.  I was the Jervaises’ guest, and whatever they imagined that I had done, they owed it to me and to themselves to treat me with a reasonable courtesy.

It was a detestable situation, and I was completely floored by it for the moment.  We were not half-way through lunch, and I felt that I could not endure to sit there for another twenty minutes, avoided, proscribed, held fast in a pillory, a butt for the sneers of any fool at the table.  On the other hand, if I got up and marched out of the room, I should be acknowledging my defeat—­and my guilt of whatever crime I was supposed to have committed.  If I ever wished to justify my perfect innocence, I should forfeit my chances, at once, by accepting the snub I had received.  To do that would be to acknowledge my sense of misbehaviour.

I leaned a little forward and glanced at Miss Tattersall who was sitting just beyond Nora Bailey on my side of the table.  And I saw that my late confidante, the user of keyholes, was faintly smiling to herself with an unmistakable air of malicious satisfaction.

I wished, then, that I had not looked.  I was no longer quite so conscious of outraged innocence.  It is true that I was guiltless of any real offence, but I saw that the charge of complicity with the chauffeur—­a charge that had certainly not lost in substance or in its suggestion of perfidy by Miss Tattersall’s rendering—­was one that I could not wholly refute.  I was in the position of a man charged with murder on good circumstantial evidence; and my first furious indignation began to give way to a detestable feeling of embarrassment, momentarily increased by the necessity to sit in silence while the inane chatter of the luncheon table swerved past me.  If I had had one friend with whom I could have talked, I might have been able to recover myself, but I defy any one in my situation to maintain an effective part with no active means of expression.