Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/237

Rh here—and that has done it. He knows," she admirably emphasised.

"Knows what I think of him, no doubt—for a brazen young prevaricator! But what else?"

She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. "What he will have seen—that I feel we're too good friends."

"Then your denial of it's false," her father fairly thundered—"and you are infatuated?"

It made her the more quiet. "I like him very much."

"So that your row about the picture," he demanded with passion, "has been all a blind?" And then as her quietness still held her: "And his a blind as much—to help him to get at you?"

She looked at him again now. "He must speak for himself—I've said what I mean."

"But what the devil do you mean?" Lord Theign, taking in the hour, had reached the door as in supremely baffled conclusion and with a sense of time lamentably lost.

Their eyes met upon it all dreadfully across the wide space, and, hurried and incommoded as she saw him, she yet made him still stand