“Warned?” Tavernake repeated.  “I really don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t!” she exclaimed impatiently.  “Why should you understand?  I don’t want to offend you, Mr. Tavernake,” she went on hurriedly.  “I would like to treat you quite frankly.  It really isn’t your place to make difficulties like this.  What is this young lady to you that you should presume to consider yourself her guardian?”

“She is a boarding-house acquaintance,” Tavernake confessed, “nothing more.”

“Then why did you tell me, only a moment ago, that she was your sister?” Mrs. Gardner demanded.

Tavernake threw open the door before which they had been standing.

“This,” he said, “is the famous dancing gallery.  Lord Clumber is quite willing to allow the pictures to remain, and I may tell you that they are insured for over sixty thousand pounds.  There is no finer dancing room than this in all London.”

Her eyes swept around it carelessly.

“I have no doubt,” she admitted coldly, “that it is very beautiful.  I prefer to continue our discussion.”

“The dining-room,” he went on, “is almost as large.  Lord Clumber tells us that he has frequently entertained eighty guests for dinner.  The system of ventilation in this room is, as you see, entirely modern.”

She took him by the arm and led him to a seat at the further end of the apartment.

“Mr. Tavernake,” she said, making an obvious attempt to control her temper, “you seem like a very sensible young man, if you will allow me to say so, and I want to convince you that it is your duty to answer my questions.  In the first place—­don’t be offended, will you?—­but I cannot possibly see what interest you and that young lady can have in one another.  You belong, to put it baldly, to altogether different social stations, and it is not easy to imagine what you could have in common.”

She paused, but Tavernake had nothing to say.  His gift of silence amounted sometimes almost to genius.  She leaned so close to him while she waited in vain for his reply, that the ermine about her neck brushed his cheek.  The perfume of her clothes and hair, the pleading of her deep violet-blue eyes, all helped to keep him tongue-tied.  Nothing of this sort had ever happened to him before.  He did not in the least understand what it could possibly mean.

“I am speaking to you now, Mr. Tavernake,” she continued earnestly, “for your own good.  When you tell the young lady, as you have promised to this evening, that you have seen me, and that I am very, very anxious to find out where she is, she will very likely go down on her knees and beg you to give me no information whatever about her.  She will do her best to make you promise to keep us apart.  And yet that is all because she does not understand.  Believe me, it is better that you should tell me the truth.  You cannot know her very well, Mr. Tavernake, but she is not very wise, that young lady.  She is very obstinate, and she has some strange ideas.  It is not well for her that she should be left in the world alone.  You must see that for yourself, Mr. Tavernake.”