The spell, whatever it may have been, had passed.  The young man lifted his hat and leaned over the side of the coach.

“I won’t get down just now, Amy,” he said.  “Tell me where you are and I’ll come and see you.  How’s Richard?”

Maraton, obeying a gesture from Lady Elisabeth, moved away with her, leaving Mrs. Bollington-Watts absorbed in a flood of family questions and answers.

“Come back with me now, won’t you?” she asked, a little abruptly.  “My uncle is restless and unwell this afternoon, and it will perhaps relieve him to have your decision.”

“What about Mrs. Bollington-Watts?”

Lady Elisabeth glanced at him for a moment.  Her eyebrows were slightly lifted.

“If you can bear to lose her, I’m sure I can.  She is really rather a dear person but she is very intense.  She will meet a crowd of people she knows, directly, and quite forget that we have slipped away.  Shall we go down Birdcage Walk, or if you are in a hurry, perhaps you would prefer a taxi?”

He shook his head.

“I prefer to walk.”

He did not at first prove a very entertaining companion.  They proceeded for some distance almost in silence.

“If I were a curious person,” Lady Elisabeth remarked, “I should certainly be puzzling my brain as to what there could have been about that very frivolous young man to call such an expression into your face.  And how terrified he was to see you!”

Maraton smiled grimly.

“You have observation, I perceive, Lady Elisabeth.”

“Powers of observation but no curiosity, thank goodness,” Lady Elisabeth declared.  “Perhaps that is just as well, for I can see that you are going to turn out to be a very mysterious person.”

“In some respects I believe that I am,” he assented equably.  “My peculiar beliefs are responsible for a good deal, you see—­and certain circumstances. . . .  But tell me—­we have both agreed to be frank—­why have you changed your attitude towards me so completely?  I scarcely dared to hope even for your recognition this morning.”

She was suddenly thoughtful.

“That was the very question I was asking myself when we crossed the street just now,” she remarked, with a faint smile.

Maraton was conscious of a curious and undefined sense of pleasure in her words.  In the act of crossing he had held her arm for a few moments, and though her assent to his physical guidance had been purely negative, there was yet something about it which had given him a vague pleasure.  Instinctively he knew that she was of the order of women to whom the merest touch from a man whom they disliked would have been torture.

“I think,” she went on, “that it is because I am trying to adopt my uncle’s point of view towards you.”

“And what is your uncle’s point of view?”

“He believes you,” she declared, “to be a very dangerous person, a rabid enthusiast with brains and also stability—­the most difficult order of person in the world to deal with.”