I could see Anne doing that, and with a still more daring spirit than the other couple had so far displayed.  I could not see her as Frank Jervaise’s mistress.  Moreover, I could not believe now, even after that morning’s scene in the wood, that she really cared for him.  If she did, she must have been an actress of genius, since, so far as I had been able to observe, her attitude towards him during the last half-hour had most nearly approached one of slightly amused contempt.

Jervaise’s evident perplexity was notably aggravated by Anne’s question.

“Well, naturally, my father and mother don’t want an open scandal,” he said irritably.

“But why a scandal?” asked Anne.  “If Arthur and Brenda were married and went to Canada?”

“I don’t say that I think it would be a scandal,” he said.  “I’m only telling you the way that they’d certainly see it.  It might have been different if your brother had never been in our service.  You must see that. We know, of course, but other people don’t, and we shall never be able to explain to them.  People like the Turnbulls and the Atkinsons and all that lot will say that Brenda eloped with the chauffeur.  It’s no good beating about the bush—­that’s the plain fact we’ve got to face.”

“Then, hadn’t we better face it?” Anne returned with a flash of indignation.  “Or do you think you can persuade Arthur to go back to Canada, alone?”

Jervaise grunted uneasily.

“You know it’s no earthly, Frank,” Brenda said.  “Why can’t you be a sport and go back and tell them that they might as well give in at once?”

“Oh! my dear girl, you must know perfectly well that they’ll never give in,” her brother replied.

“Mr. Jervaise might,” Banks put in.

Frank turned to him sharply.  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“He’d have given in this morning, if it hadn’t been for you,” Banks said, staring with his most dogged expression at Jervaise.

“What makes you think so?” Jervaise retaliated.

“What he said, and the way he behaved,” Banks asserted, the English yeoman stock in him still very apparent.

“You’re mistaken,” Jervaise snapped.

“Give me a chance to prove it, then,” was Banks’s counter.

“How?”

“I’ve got to take that car back.  Give me a chance for another talk with Mr. Jervaise; alone this time.”

I looked at Banks with a sudden feeling of anxiety.  I was afraid that he meant at last to use that “pull” he had hinted at on the hill; and I had an intuitive shrinking from the idea of his doing that.  This open defiance was fine and upright.  The other attitude suggested to my mind the conception of something cowardly, a little base and underhand.  He looked, I admit, the picture of sturdy virtue as he stood there challenging his late master to permit this test of old Jervaise’s attitude, but the prize at stake was so inestimably precious to Banks, that it must have altered all his values.  He would, I am sure, have committed murder for Brenda—­any sort of murder.