“Oh!  I should certainly go, too,” she replied.

Jervaise frowned moodily.  I could see that he was caught in an awkward dilemma, but I was not absolutely sure as to the form it took.  Had Anne made conditions?  Her remark seemed, I thought, to hint a particular stipulation.  Had she tried to coerce him with the threat of accompanying her brother to Canada unless the engagement to Brenda was openly sanctioned by the family?

“But you must see how impossible it is,” Jervaise said, still looking at Anne.

“We don’t think so,” Brenda put in.

“You don’t understand,” her brother returned savagely.

“You don’t,” Brenda replied.

Jervaise snorted impatiently, but he had enough control of himself to avoid the snare of being drawn into a bickering match.

“It isn’t as if the decision rested with me,” he went on, looking down at the hearth-rug, but still, I fancy, addressing himself almost exclusively to Anne.  “I can’t make my father and mother see things as you do.  No one could.  Why can’t you compromise?”

“Oh! How?” Brenda broke out with a fierce contempt.

“Agree to separate—­for a time,” Jervaise said.  “Let Banks go to Canada and start a farm or something, and afterwards you could join him without any open scandal.”

“Any mortal thing to save a scandal, of course,” Brenda commented scornfully.

“Would you be prepared to do that?” Jervaise asked, turning to Banks.

I thought Banks seemed a trifle irresolute, as though the bribe of finally possessing Brenda was tempting enough to outweigh any other consideration.  But he looked at her before replying, and her contemptuous shake of the head was completely decisive.  He could not question any determination of hers.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he said.

“But look here, Brenda, why...”  Jervaise began on a note of desperate reasonableness.

“Because I’m going out with him,” Brenda said.  They might have chased that argument round for half an hour if Ronnie had not once more interposed.

His dudgeon had been slowly giving place to a shocked surprise.  It was being borne in upon his reluctant mind that Brenda and Banks honestly intended to get married.  And here was Frank Jervaise, for some mistaken purpose of his own, calmly admitting the possibility of the outrage, instead of scorning the bare idea of it with violence.

“I think you’re making a ghastly mistake, Frank,” he said with a composure that was intended to be extremely ominous.

Jervaise clutched at the interruption, probably to give himself a little more time.  The women were proving so unamenable to his excellent reasoning.  One simply contradicted him, and the other refused to speak.  “What’s a mistake, Ronnie?” he asked.