“Any commands for me?” he inquired

This time she answered him.  “I have something to ask you,” she said.

He smiled graciously, and opened his tobacco-pouch.  He was fresh and strong after his night’s sleep—­healthy and handsome and good-humored.  The house-maids had had a peep at him that morning, and had wished—­like Desdemona, with a difference—­that “Heaven had made all three of them such a man.”

“Well,” he said, “what is it?”

She put her question, without a single word of preface—­purposely to surprise him.

“Mr. Delamayn,” she said, “do you know where Anne Silvester is this morning?”

He was filling his pipe as she spoke, and he dropped some of the tobacco on the floor.  Instead of answering before he picked up the tobacco he answered after—­in surly self-possession, and in one word—­“No.”

“Do you know nothing about her?”

He devoted himself doggedly to the filling of his pipe.  “Nothing.”

“On your word of honor, as a gentleman?”

“On my word of honor, as a gentleman.”

He put back his tobacco-pouch in his pocket.  His handsome face was as hard as stone.  His clear blue eyes defied all the girls in England put together to see into his mind.  “Have you done, Miss Lundie?” he asked, suddenly changing to a bantering politeness of tone and manner.

Blanche saw that it was hopeless—­saw that she had compromised her own interests by her own headlong act.  Sir Patrick’s warning words came back reproachfully to her now when it was too late.  “We commit a serious mistake if we put him on his guard at starting.”

There was but one course to take now.  “Yes,” she said.  “I have done.”

“My turn now,” rejoined Geoffrey.  “You want to know where Miss Silvester is.  Why do you ask Me?”

Blanche did all that could be done toward repairing the error that she had committed.  She kept Geoffrey as far away as Geoffrey had kept her from the truth.

“I happen to know,” she replied “that Miss Silvester left the place at which she had been staying about the time when you went out walking yesterday.  And I thought you might have seen her.”

“Oh?  That’s the reason—­is it?” said Geoffrey, with a smile.

The smile stung Blanche’s sensitive temper to the quick.  She made a final effort to control herself, before her indignation got the better of her.

“I have no more to say, Mr. Delamayn.”  With that reply she turned her back on him, and closed the door of the morning-room between them.