Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/278

 "No—yes," he answered disjointedly. "Couldn't you promise not to stop in town, but to go at once to the country?"

Bewildered, Terry replied that, to please him, she would do as he suggested, if she possibly could, though she was unable to imagine what his reason could be.

"You'll hear later," he began, then changed his sentence. "I will give you my reason later," he amended. "I know I've no right to dictate, or even to ask a favour but if you would do me this last one"

"This last one?" she echoed.

"I mean," and he smiled faintly, "that I'll try not to ask others."

Terry lightly responded that she liked her friends to ask favours of her, and took it as a compliment. But when Sir Ian had gone, and she tried to analyze the anxious feeling she had, these words of his, and other somewhat strange expressions he had used in their conversation, came back to her.

She and Nora Verney did not leave St. Pierre de Chartreuse till that night, twelve hours after Sir Ian Hereward. They shared a compartment in a , but neither slept. The mind of each was tenanted, almost to the exclusion of other thoughts, by the image of a man; and the two men were of the same blood and the same name.

"Why doesn't he want me to stop for even one night