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“But it just shows the kind of man he is,” she concluded. “Any other man would have realised, after our conversation driving in, that it would be in the worst possible taste for him to put himself in my way any more than he could help. He ought to have arranged to be back here in time to get home early, no matter how important his business was. He doesn’t know how to behave.”

She dreaded the thought of a tête-à-tête meal; she was tired and wanted to be back with Uncle Markham, and the idea of borrowing anything from the landlady, however good a sort, was most distasteful.

Any other aspect of the affair never entered her innocent mind, nor was she aware of the many curious eyes fixed on her in the dining-room that night. She was used to being looked at—people had always stared at Lady Trent in theatres and restaurants—she had long ceased to notice it. Power prolonged the meal unduly. Pamela was not making herself an agreeable companion, but that did not matter, comparatively speaking.

“But honestly I could swear she hasn’t the ghost of an idea that people are looking at her, or what they’re saying,” he soliloquised, watching her profile, half turned away from him, and her abstracted air, as if the rest of the world did not exist for her. “By Heaven, she does that sort of thing well! I never saw a girl that could come within streets of her.”

His eyes narrowed. He crushed the grape between his fingers to an uneatable pulp and swore softly under his breath as the juice spurted on to his cuff. Pamela continued to sit with averted eyes, serenely gazing into space. She had never seemed so aloof, so absolutely unattainable.

“But I’m going to have her in the end,” he vowed, with clenched hands—“if not one way, then another, as I told her. Everything’s been above-board so far, and she turns her back on me; now I’ll try every way that occurs to me,