She wore her deceptive air of extreme elegance, and her prettiest frock. It was a costume grossly unsuited to the tiny villa, and she had hitherto worn it only in London. Any man beholding her might have been pardoned for supposing her to be a luxury-loving idler, a girl who thought of little else but appearances.
Gaunt stood up. She approached him with a mingling of shyness and welcome; her manner seemed to trust him completely--to say that she knew herself safe in his hands. It might have made appeal to the veriest ruffian, had not his eye been jaundiced by his knowledge of her mother, and of their penniless circumstances. Her virginal modesty was to him merely consummate hypocrisy.
"Well," he said, "so I hear that you are not going to commit yourself until I stand committed too? Is that so?"
She laughed a little breathlessly. His non-smiling, dark face and big, rather hulking person were formidable, and she was conscious of fear.
"You said it was a business transaction, and business transactions ought to be business-like, ought they not?" she asked. She was speaking playfully, while her eyes sought his, as wanting to understand, to obtain some key to his curious behaviour. "It was kind of you to come, nevertheless," she added, with a hesitation born of his lack of response.
"I am a non-social, boorish kind of person," he said abruptly, after a pause, during which she withdrew herself and sat down. "I suppose I ought to begin with some kind of apology for such a blunt offer, hey? But I am told that young ladies nowadays like something out of the way; and you could fill in the details for yourself, I expect. You saw me admiring you that day in the Gallery, did you not?"
Again the eyes, so like, so unlike, her mother's, were lifted to those of the man who remembered each look and smile of twenty years back as if it had been yesterday.
"I noticed something special--something I could not interpret--in your manner," was her gentle reply. "I told my friend that I thought you must imagine that you knew me. I was interested when mamma said that it was my likeness to her which drew your attention. I was glad to have it so well explained."
He leaned forward, intent upon her face and her down-bent gaze. "Well," he said, in a voice which thrilled her curiously, "perhaps you think that my suggestion is not quite so surprising, after all?"