It was Banks who re-started the conversation.  The solitude we had permitted to the lovers was at once too little and too much for them.  What had passed between them by an exchange of signals in the brief interval, I could only guess; they certainly had not spoken, but Banks’s new subject suggested that they had somehow agreed to divert the interest momentarily from themselves.

“I’ve brought Mr. Melhuish back with me,” he said.  “He’s going to stay the night with us.”  He may have been addressing Brenda in answer to some look of inquiry that had indicated my resolutely unconscious back.

Since Turnbull had gone, I was more than ever the outsider and intruder, and I was all too keenly aware of that fact as I turned back towards the room.  My embarrassment was not relieved by the slightly perplexed astonishment the announcement had evoked in the faces of the two women.

“But I thought you were staying at the Hall,” Brenda said, looking at me with that air of suspicion to which I was rapidly growing accustomed.

“I was,” I said; “but for reasons that your brother may be able to explain, I’m staying there no longer.”

She looked at Jervaise, then, but he had no reply ready.  I had put him in a difficult position.  I had a chance to revenge myself at last.

“I don’t understand, Frank,” Brenda prompted him; and Anne began to come to life for the first time since I had entered the room—­there was a new effect of mischief about her, as if she had partly guessed the cause of my expulsion from the Hall.

“It’s a long story,” Jervaise prevaricated.

“But one that I think you ought to tell,” I said, “in justice to me.”

“We found that Melhuish had been, most unwarrantably, interfering in—­in this affair of yours, B.,” he grumbled; “and, in any case, it’s no business of his.”

Brenda’s dark eyebrows lifted with that expression of surprised questioning to which she could give such unusual effect.  I suppose it emphasised that queer contrast—­unique in my experience—­between her naturally fair hair, and her black eyebrows and eyelashes.  I have to emphasise the fact that the straw gold of her abundant vital hair was its natural colour.  She had often, I believe, threatened to dye it, in order to avoid the charge of having already done so.

“What piffle!” she remarked.  “How has Mr. Melhuish interfered?  Why, this is the first time I’ve seen him since last night at the dance.  Besides,” she glanced at me with a half-whimsical touch of apology, “I hardly know him.”

“Oh! it’s some romantic rot of his, I suppose,” Jervaise returned sullenly.  “I never thought it was serious.”

“But,” Anne interposed, “it sounds very serious...if Mr. Melhuish has had to leave the Hall in the middle of his visit—­and come to us.”  I inferred that she was deliberately overlooking my presence in the room for some purpose of her own.  She certainly spoke as if I were not present.