“Do you know why I came?” he asked.

Lillian looked up innocently.  “It’s so hard to be certain of anything in this world,” she said.  “But one is always at liberty to guess.”

Again he was perplexed.  Her attitude was not quite the attitude of one who controls the game, and yet—­He looked at her with a puzzled scrutiny.  Women for him had always spelled the incomprehensible; he was at his best, his strongest, his surest in the presence of men.  Feeling his disadvantage, yet determined to gain his end, he made a last attempt.

“How did you amuse yourself at Grosvenor Square this morning before Eve came to you?” he asked.  The effort was awkwardly blunt, but it was direct.

Lillian was buttoning her glove.  She did not raise her head as he spoke, but her fingers paused in their task.  For a second she remained motionless, then she looked up slowly.

“Oh,” she said, sweetly, “so I was right in my guess?  You did come to find out whether I sat in the morning-room with my hands in my lap—­or wandered about in search of entertainment?”

Loder colored with annoyance and apprehension.  Every look, every tone of Lillian’s was distasteful to him.  No microscope could have revealed her more fully to him than did his own eyesight.  But it was not the moment for personal antipathies; there were other interests than his own at stake.  With new resolution he returned her glance.

“Then I must still ask my first question, why did you say, ’I thought it would be you?’” His gaze was direct—­so direct that it disconcerted her.  She laughed a little uneasily.

“Because I knew.”

“How did you know?”

“Because—­” she began; then again she laughed.  “Because,” she added, quickly, as if moved by a fresh impulse, “Jack Chilcote made it very obvious to any one who was in his morning-room at twelve o’clock today that it would be you and not he who would be found filling his place this afternoon!  It’s all very well to talk about honor, but when one walks into an empty room and sees a telegram as long as a letter open on a bureau—­”

But her sentence was never finished.  Loder had heard what he came to hear; any confession she might have to offer was of no moment in his eyes.

“My dear girl,” he broke in, brusquely, “don’t trouble!  I should make a most unsatisfactory father confessor.”  He spoke quickly.  His color was still high, but not of annoyance.  His suspense was transformed into unpleasant certainty; but the exchange left him surer of himself.  His perplexity had dropped to a quiet sense of self-reliance; his paramount desire was for solitude in which to prepare for the task that lay before him; the most congenial task the world possessed—­the unravelling of Chilcote’s tangled skeins.  Looking into Lillian’s eyes, he smiled.  “Good-bye!” he said, holding out his hand.  “I think we’ve finished—­for to-day.”