"Trust Uncle Dudley. He's borrowed a bicycle and is burning up the River road with it." "Good. How soon will you be through?" "About three minutes." "You've hired a motor, you said? Get it and run back here as soon as you can, will you?" He rapidly explained the situation, though making no mention of Higginson: how somebody had plotted to get them together in the darkness of Main Street, how Miss Carstairs and her friend had kindly stopped to warn them, and how he had humored her by promising to take all sorts of precautions. "Right-O," said Peter. "I'll be in the alley at the back in no time. Come quick when I honk three times." Varney came back into the little office where Mary Carstairs waited, fresh from more cheap plotting in which she was the innocent central figure; and faced her, uncomfortable, ill at ease, disquieted inwardly as a conspirator taken red-handed. "It was Maginnis--upstairs," he explained awkwardly. "Yes?" she said indifferently, and resumed the buttoning of her glove. "And will you tell me something now? It has been on my mind since last night." "Certainly." "Who was it that spoke of me to you and made you think that I was a little girl?" He was entirely taken aback by the question; but he could have parried it easily, and he knew it. However, he was heartily sick of subterfuge for that night. "It was your father," he said bluntly. "My father!" She stood silent a moment, slim hands interlocked before her, heavily fringed eyes lowered. "So you know them both--my mother and my father. Then--the mistake--about my age," she added with something of an effort, "was natural enough. I have not seen my father for many years." "I see him," said he, "constantly. Your father and I are great chums." A sudden insane hope overwhelmed him, and he went on with a rush: "You know, or rather probably you don't know, that he and my mother were old friends; and I am proud to have fallen heir to the friendship. You say that you have not seen him for some time? He is growing older very fast this last year or two; he is much changed of late. And then, Miss Carstairs, he is desperately lonely, all by himself in that great house of his--" "_Stop_!" cried Mary Carstairs, with quick passionateness. "Stop! You are trying to make me feel sorry for my father." "Well," he said, as stormy as she, "_you ought to_! But your friends are waiting. I must not detain you any longer." At the curtness of his speech a very faint wave of color ran up her cheek; and when he saw this he was sorry and glad in a single breath. At least, she could not say afterwards that he had ever tried to make himself falsely civil and lyingly agreeable. "Yes, I have stayed very much too long already. You've promised that you will be careful, haven't you? I'm really too sorry," she said, from the door, "that your visit to Hunston should have been made disagreeable in all these ways."