"So that was her reason," he said presently.

"Of course. Of course. It\'s the reason for the whole thing. It\'s the reason why, when a young man like you sees a young woman like me—I mean like the lady [Pg 169] you thought I was—in an over-stimulating and tempestuous place like this, instead of taking off his silly hat to her, he should jam it well down over his silly ears and—quit!"

"You keep on saying \'what I thought you were.\' I can\'t think how I could, or why I did."

"I know why," she replied serenely. "You fancied I had more decorations in my back hair than a respectable woman can well carry."

She meditated.

"I thought I could afford a rose or two. But it seems I couldn\'t."

"You? You can afford anything—anything. All the same——"

"Well, if I can afford to sit with you, out here, at a quarter past ten, on this old heathenish piazza, I suppose I can."

"All the same——" he insisted.

She meditated again.

"All the same, if it wasn\'t those roses, I can\'t think what it was."

"Dear lady, it wasn\'t the roses. You are so deadly innocent I think I ought to tell you what it was."

"Do," she said.

"It was, really, it was seeing you here, walking by yourself. It\'s so jolly late, you know."

She drew herself up. "An American woman can walk anywhere, at any time."

"Oh, yes, of course, of course. But for ordinary people, and in Latin countries, it\'s considered—well, a trifle singular."

She smiled.

"You puzzle me," he said. "Just now you seemed perfectly aware of it. And yet——"

"And yet?" she raised her eyebrows. [Pg 170]

"And yet, well—here you are, you know."

"Here I am, and here I\'ve got to stay, it seems. Well—before that?"

"Before that?"

"Before this?" She tapped her foot, impatient at the slow movement of his thought. "Up there in the hotel?"

"Oh, in the hotel. I suppose it was seeing you with——"

It was positively terrible, the look with which she faced him now. But his idea was that he had got to help her (hadn\'t she helped him?), and he was going through with it. It was permissible; it was even imperative, seeing the lengths, the depths, rather, of intimacy that they had gone to.

"Those two," he said. "They don\'t seem exactly your sort."

"You mean," said she, "they are not exactly yours."

She felt the shudder of his unspoken "Heaven forbid!"

"I suppose," she continued, "if a European man sees any woman alone in a hotel with two men whom he can\'t size up right away as her blood relations, he\'s apt to think things. Well, for all you know, Mr. Tarbuck might be my uncle and Mr. Bingham-Booker my half-brother."

"But they aren\'t."

"No. As far as blood goes, they aren\'t any more to me than Adam. You have me there."

There was a long pause which Thesiger, for the life of him, could not fill.

"Well," she reverted, "Mr. Whoever-you-are, I don\'t know that I owe you an explanation——"

"You don\'t owe me anything."

"All the same I\'m going to give you one, so that [Pg 171] next time you\'ll think twice before you make any more of your venerable European mistakes. It isn\'t every woman who\'d know how to turn them to your advantage. Perhaps you\'ve seen what\'s wrong with Mr. Bingham-Booker?"

He intimated that it was not practicable not to see. "If I may say so, that makes it all the more unfitting——"

"That\'s all you know about it, Mr.——"

"Thesiger," he supplied.

"Mr. Thesiger. That boy had to be taken care of. He was killing himself with drink before we came away. He\'d had a shock to his nerves, that\'s what brought it on. He was ordered to Europe as his one chance. Somebody had to go with him, somebody he\'d mind, and there wasn\'t anybody he did mind but me. I\'ve known him since he was a little thing in knickerbockers, that high. So we fixed it that I was to go out and look after Binky, and Binky\'s mother—he\'s her only son—was coming out too, to look after me. We cared for appearances as much as you do. Well, the day before we sailed her married daughter was taken sick, in the inconsiderate way that married daughters have, and she couldn\'t go. And, do you know, there wasn\'t a woman that could take her place. They were afraid, every one of them, because they knew." She lowered her voice to utter it. "It makes him mad."

"My dear lady, it was a job for a trained nurse."

"Trained nurse? They couldn\'t afford one. And we didn\'t want a uniform hanging around and rubbing it into the poor boy and everybody else that he was an incurable dipsomaniac."

"But you—you?"
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