"Nothing, my dear boy. I am afraid I kept you waiting longer than I intended to. I hope you have not been anxious?" Guy seemed, however, quite unconcerned.

"Anxious!" exclaimed Cyril indignantly. "Well, rather! How could you have kept me in such suspense? Why didn't you come to me at once on leaving Miss Prentice?"

"But I did. I have just left her."

"And she is really all right? The governess, Miss What's her name, is with her?"

"Certainly. But I didn't want to leave Mrs. Thompkins alone with a stranger in a strange place, so I stayed and lunched with them."

Cyril almost choked with rage. He had had no lunch at all. He had been too upset to think of such a thing and all the time they--oh! It was too abominable! Campbell was a selfish little brute. He would never forgive him, thought Cyril, scowling down at the complacent offender. For he was complacent, that was the worst of it. From the top of his sleek, red head to the tips of his immaculate boots, he radiated a triumphant self-satisfaction. What was the matter with the man? wondered Cyril. He seemed indefinably changed. There was a jauntiness about him--a light in his eyes which Cyril did not remember to have noticed before. And what was the meaning of those two violets drooping so sentimentally in his buttonhole? Cyril stared at the flowers as if hypnotised.

"So you liked Miss Prentice?" he managed to say, controlling himself with an effort.

"Rather! But I say, Cyril, it's all rot about her being that Prentice woman."

"Ah, you think so?"

"I don't think--I know. Why, she speaks French like a native."

"How did you find that out?" asked Cyril, forgetting his indignation in his surprise at this new development.

"We had a duffer of a waiter who understood very little English, so Mrs. Thompkins spoke to him in French, and such French! It sounded like the real thing."

Cyril was dumfounded. How could a girl brought up in a small inland village, which she had left only six months before, have learnt French? And then he remembered that the doctor had told him that she had retained a dim recollection of Paris. Why had the significance of that fact not struck him before?

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