"It would be--just polite," she submitted.
Ann frowned.
"I always seem to be thanking him!" she complained, and, in response to
the other's glance of inquiry, recounted the various occasions on which
Coventry had rendered her a service.
"Not a bad record of knight-errantry for a confirmed woman-hater, is it?"
she added with a rueful touch of humour.
"He wasn't always a woman-hater," answered Cara slowly. Her pansy-dark eyes
held a curious dreaming look.
"I'd forgotten. Of course, you'd met him before you came here. Did you know
him pretty well?"
"It was so many years ago," deprecated Cara, with a little wave of her hand
which seemed to set her former friendship with Eliot away in the back ages.
"But I knew a good deal about him--we knew his people when I was a girl in
my teens--and I can understand why--how he became such a misanthrope."
Ann made no answer. Somehow she felt she could not put any direct questions
about this man whose changing, oddly contradictory moods had baffled her
so completely and--although she would not have acknowledged it--had caught
and held her imagination with equal completeness. Perhaps she was hardly
actually aware how much the queer, abrupt owner of Heronsmere occupied her
thoughts.
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