Randolph remembered his own impression the only time he had ever seen her with the child, and was struck with the young girl’s instinct again coinciding with his own.  But, possibly because he knew he could never again feel toward Miss Avondale as he had, he was the more anxious to be just, and he was about to utter a protest against this general assumption, when the voice of Sir William broke in upon them.  He was taking his leave—­and the opportunity of accompanying Miss Avondale to her lodgings on the way to his hotel.  He lingered a moment over his handshaking with Randolph.

“Awfully glad to have met you, and I fancy you’re awfully glad to get rid of what they call your ‘trust.’  Must have given you a beastly lot of bother, eh—­might have given you more?”

He nodded familiarly to Miss Eversleigh, and turned away with Miss Avondale, who waved her usual smiling patronage to Randolph, even including his companion in that half-amused, half-superior salutation.  Perhaps it was this that put a sudden hauteur into the young girl’s expression as she stared at Miss Avondale’s departing figure.

“If you ever come to England, Mr. Trent,” she said, with a pretty dignity in her youthful face, “I hope you will find some people not quite so rude as my cousin and”—­

“Miss Avondale, you would say,” returned Randolph quietly.  “As to her, I am quite accustomed to her maturer superiority, which, I am afraid, is the effect of my own youth and inexperience; and I believe that, in course of time, your cousin’s brusqueness might be as easily understood by me.  I dare say,” he added, with a laugh, “that I must seem to them a very romantic visionary with my ‘trust,’ and the foolish importance I have put upon a very trivial occurrence.”

“I don’t think so,” said the girl quickly, “and I consider Bill very rude, and,” she added, with a return of her boyish frankness, “I shall tell him so.  As for Miss Avondale, she’s at least thirty, I understand; perhaps she can’t help showing it in that way, too.”

But here Randolph, to evade further personal allusions, continued laughingly:  “And as I’ve lost my ‘trust,’ I haven’t even that to show in defense.  Indeed, when you all are gone I shall have nothing to remind me of my kind benefactor.  It will seem like a dream.”

Miss Eversleigh was silent for a moment, and then glanced quickly around her.  The rest of the company were their elders, and, engaged in conversation at the other end of the apartment, had evidently left the young people to themselves.

“Wait a moment,” she said, with a youthful air of mystery and earnestness.  Randolph saw that she had slipped an Indian bracelet, profusely hung with small trinkets, from her arm to her wrist, and was evidently selecting one.  It proved to be a child’s tiny ring with a small pearl setting.  “This was given to me by Cousin Jack,” said Miss Eversleigh in a low voice, “when I was a child, at some frolic or festival, and I have kept it ever since.  I brought it with me when we came here as a kind of memento to show him.  You know that is impossible now.  You say you have nothing of his to keep.  Will you accept this?  I know he would be glad to know you had it.  You could wear it on your watch chain.  Don’t say no, but take it.”