“Try some of these little hot cakes,” he said, tendering a plateful.  “They are quite one of Mrs. Judson’s specialties.”

With amazing swiftness he had reassumed his mask.  The bright, hazel eyes were entirely free from any hint of pain, and his voice held nothing more than conventional politeness.  Sara meekly accepted one of the cakes in question, and for a little while the conversation ran on stereotyped lines.

Presently, when tea was over, he offered her a cigarette.

“I have not forgotten your tastes, you see,” he said, smiling.

“I do smoke,” she admitted.  “But”—­the confession came with a rush, and she did not quite know what impelled her to make it—­“I smoked—­that day in the train—­out of sheer defiance.”

“I was sure of it,” he responded in amused tones.  “But now”—­striking a match and holding it for her to light her cigarette—­“you will smoke because you really like it, and because it would be a friendly action and condone the fact that you are being held a prisoner against your will.”

Sara smiled.

“It is a very charming prison,” she said, contemplating the harmony of the room with satisfied eyes.

“You like it?” he asked eagerly.

She looked at him in surprise.  What could it matter to him whether she liked it or not?

“Why, of course, I like it,” she replied.  “Who wouldn’t?  You see,” she added a little wistfully, “I have no home of my own now, so I have to enjoy other people’s.”

“I have no home, either,” he said shortly.

“But—­but this——­”

“Is the house in which I live.  One wants more than a few sticks of furniture to make a home.”

Sara was struck by the intense bitterness in his tone.  Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as any sphinx.

She hastily steered the conversation towards a less dangerous channel, and gradually they drifted into the discussion of art and music; and Sara, not without some inward trepidation—­remembering Molly’s experience—­touched on his own musicianship.

“It was surely you I herd?” she queried a trifle hesitatingly.  “You were playing some Russian music that I knew.  Your man ordered me off the premises”—­smiling a little—­“so I didn’t hear as much as I should have liked.”

“Is that a hint?” he asked whimsically.

“A broad one.  Please take it.”

He hesitated a moment.  Then—­

“Very well,” he said abruptly.

He rose and led the way into an adjoining room.

Like the hall they had just quitted, it was pleasantly illumined by candles in silver sconces, and had evidently been arranged to serve exclusively as a music-room, for it contained practically no furniture beyond a couple of chairs, and a beautiful mahogany cabinet, of which the doors stood open, revealing sliding shelves crammed full of musical scores.