“There is something I must say to you——­”

Her arms hung lax, her head drooped forward, she looked at him from under her brows.

“I have suffered so much—­oh, I have suffered!  I have longed for this moment.  Will you say—­that you forgive me?”

“My dear Mrs. Florio”—­Piers began with good-natured expostulation, a sort of forced bluffness; but she would not hear him.

“Not that name!  Not from you.  There’s no harm; you won’t—­you can’t misunderstand me, such old friends as we are.  I want you to call me by my own name, and to make me feel that we are friends still—­that you can really forgive me.”

“There is nothing in the world to forgive,” he insisted, in the same tone.  “Of course we are friends!  How could we be anything else?”

“I behaved infamously to you!  I can’t think how I had the heart to do it!”

Piers was tortured with nervousness.  Had her voice and manner declared insincerity, posing, anything of that kind, he would have found the situation much more endurable; but Olga had tears in her eyes, and not the tears of an actress; her tones had recovered something of their old quality, and reminded him painfully of the time when Mrs. Hannaford was dying.  She held a hand to him, her pale face besought his compassion.

“Come now, let us talk in the old way, as you wish,” he said, just pressing her fingers.  “Of course I felt it—­but then I was myself altogether to blame.  I importuned you for what you couldn’t give.  Remembering that, wasn’t your action the most sensible, and really the kindest?”

“I don’t know,” Olga murmured, in a voice just audible.

“Of course it was!  There now, we’ve done with all that.  Tell me more about your life this last year or two.  You are such a brilliant person.  I felt rather overcome——­”

“Nonsense!” But Olga brightened a little.  “What of your own brilliancy?  I read somewhere that you are a famous man in Russia ——­”

Piers laughed, spontaneously this time, and, finding it a way of escape, gossiped about his own achievements with mirthful exaggeration.

“Do you see the Derwents?” Mrs. Florio asked of a sudden, with a sidelong look.

So vexed was Otway at the embarrassment he could not wholly hide, and which delayed his answer, that he spoke the truth with excessive bluntness.

“I have met Miss Derwent in society.”

“I don’t often see them,” said Olga, in a tone of weariness.  “I suppose we belong to different worlds.”

At the earliest possible moment, Piers rose with decision.  He felt that he had not pleased Mrs. Florio, that perhaps he had offended her, and in leaving her he tried to atone for involuntary unkindness.

“But we shall see each other again, of course!” she exclaimed, retaining his hand.  “You will come again soon?”

“Certainly I will.”

“And your address—­let me have your address——­”