Geoffrey had arranged overnight, to breakfast early, by himself, and to walk the ten miles to his brother’s house; sending a servant to fetch his luggage later in the day.
He had got on his hat; he was standing in the hall, searching his pocket for his second self, the pipe--when Blanche suddenly appeared from the morning-room, and placed herself between him and the house door.
“Up early--eh?” said Geoffrey. “I’m off to my brother’s.”
She made no reply. He looked at her closer. The girl’s eyes were trying to read his face, with an utter carelessness of concealment, which forbade (even to his mind) all unworthy interpretation of her motive for stopping him on his way out.
This time she answered him. “I have something to ask you,” she said.
He smiled graciously, and opened his tobacco-pouch. He was fresh and strong after his night’s sleep--healthy and handsome and good-humored. The house-maids had had a peep at him that morning, and had wished--like Desdemona, with a difference--that “Heaven had made all three of them such a man.”
She put her question, without a single word of preface--purposely to surprise him.
“Mr. Delamayn,” she said, “do you know where Anne Silvester is this morning?”
He was filling his pipe as she spoke, and he dropped some of the tobacco on the floor. Instead of answering before he picked up the tobacco he answered after--in surly self-possession, and in one word--“No.”
He devoted himself doggedly to the filling of his pipe. “Nothing.”
He put back his tobacco-pouch in his pocket. His handsome face was as hard as stone. His clear blue eyes defied all the girls in England put together to see into _his_ mind. “Have you done, Miss Lundie?” he asked, suddenly changing to a bantering politeness of tone and manner.
Blanche saw that it was hopeless--saw that she had compromised her own interests by her own headlong act. Sir Patrick’s warning words came back reproachfully to her now when it was too late. “We commit a serious mistake if we put him on his guard at starting.”
There was but one course to take now. “Yes,” she said. “I have done.”
“My turn now,” rejoined Geoffrey. “You want to know where Miss Silvester is. Why do you ask Me?”
Blanche did all that could be done toward repairing the error that she had committed. She kept Geoffrey as far away as Geoffrey had kept _her_ from the truth.