y:
"To-morrow, then, at twelve."
Then she looked at me with the odd veiled glance I had seen before--a
glance which expressed both dislike and fear, and held at the same time
a keener and more piercing observation than anybody at first sight would
have been likely to charge the butterfly-like woman with.
I have spoken quite openly, and as if what I have had to say had been
the most commonplace matter in the world. Violet had heard me, but when
we went back to the drawing-room together she asked no questions. She
has told me since that she wondered a little what appointment I could
have with the Baroness Bonnar, but she gave me here the first of a
hundred thousand proofs of that noble freedom from the pinch of small
curiosity which helps to make her different from and superior to her
sex.
I kept my appointment next day, and found the baroness at home. She had
a dainty little house of her own, and I suppose that at this time
she kept better style, was furnished with completer credentials, was
admitted to know better people, and was more liberally supplied with
funds than at any other period of her curiously vagabond existence. She
was to me at this time the Baroness Bonnar pure and simple, a foreign
lady of wealth and position who moved in good society, had agreeable
and influential friends, and obvious command of money. She was to me,
in short, what she was to the rest of the world, and I had no earthly
reason to doubt any of her pretences. But I had come with a definite
object, and I approached it at once. She was not at all disposed to
banter to-day, but met me with perfect candor.
"My time is a little limited, Captain Fyffe," she began. "Will you do
me the honor to let me know at once to what I owe your visit?"
"I passed you last night in Bond Street," I returned. She nodded
briefly, with her lips tight set and her eyes glittering a little
dangerously, I thought. "Would you oblige me by telling me the name of
your companion?"
"Would you oblige me," she retorted, "by telling me the reasons for
which you ask it?"
She was so very quick and resolute that I saw at once she had been
prepared for the occasion.
"I had rather not give my reason just at present, baroness," I said. "I
have, as a matter of fact, no reason for asking the lady's name for my
own satisfaction, because I know it with much more certainty than you
do."
"Oh!" she said, very quietly. "Then why do you ask?"
"Let me change my quest
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