"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.
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