Arranmore smiled.  He had quite forgotten his letters.  Lady Caroom always amused him so well.

“She is very like what you were at her age,” he remarked.  “What a pity it was that I was such a poverty-stricken beggar in those days.  I am sure that I should have married you.”

“Now I am beginning to like you,” she declared, settling down more comfortably in her chair.  “If you can keep up like that we shall be getting positively sentimental presently, and if there’s anything I adore in this world—­especially before luncheon—­it is sentiment.  Do you remember we used to waltz together, Arranmore?”

“You gave me a glove one night,” he said.  “I have it still.”

“And you pressed my hand—­and—­it was in the Setons’ conservatory—­how bold you were.”

“And the next day,” he declared, in an aggrieved tone, “I heard that you were engaged to Caroom.  You treated me shamefully.”

“These reminiscences,” she declared, “are really sweet, but you are most ungrateful.  I was really almost too kind to you.  They were all fearfully anxious to get me married, because Dumesnil always used to say that my complexion would give out in a year or two, and I wasted no end of time upon you, who were perfectly hopeless as a husband.  After all, though, I believe it paid.  It used to annoy Caroom so much, and I believe he proposed to me long before he meant to so as to get rid of you.”

“I,” Arranmore remarked, “was the victim.”

She sat up with eyes suddenly bright.

“Upon my word,” she declared, “I have an idea.  It is the most charming and flattering thing, and it never occurred to me before.  After all, it was not eccentricity which caused you to throw up your work at the Bar—­and disappear.  It was your hopeless devotion to me.  Don’t disappoint me now by denying it.  Please don’t!  It was the announcement of my engagement, wasn’t it?”

“And it has taken you all these years to find it out?

“I was shockingly obtuse,” she murmured.  “The thing came to me just now as a revelation.  Poor, dear man, how you must have suffered.  This puts us on a different footing altogether, doesn’t it?” “Altogether,” he admitted.

“And,” she continued, eyeing him now with a sudden nervousness, “emboldens me to ask you a question which I have been dying to ask you for the last few years.  I wonder whether you will answer it.”

“I wonder!” he repeated.

A change in him, too, was noticeable.  That wonderful impassivity of feature which never even in his lighter moments passed altogether away, seemed to deepen every line in his hard, clear-cut face.  His mouth was close drawn, his eyes were suddenly colder and expressionless.  There was about him at such times as—­these an almost repellent hardness.  His emotions, and the man himself, seemed frozen.  Lady Caroom had seen him look like it once before, and she sighed.  Nevertheless, she persevered.