Desmond saw that Mrs. Merriman had been deliberately kept in ignorance of the grounds of the Englishmen’s anxiety, and was seeking on the spur of the moment for a means to divert her from the subject, when he was spared the necessity.  Miss Merriman had been looking at him curiously, and she now turned to her mother and said something in a tone inaudible to Desmond.

“La! you don’t say so, my dear,” exclaimed the lady.

“Why.  Mr. Burke, my daughter tells me that we have met you before.”

His vague recollection of Mrs. Merriman’s voice being thus so suddenly confirmed, he recalled, as from a far distant past, a scene upon Hounslow Heath; a coach that stood perilously near the ditch, a girl at the horses’ heads, a lady stamping her foot at two servants wrestling in drunken stupidity on the ground.

“You never gave us an opportunity of thanking you,” continued Mrs. Merriman. “’Twas not kind of you, Mr. Burke, to slip away thus without a word after doing two poor lone women such a service.”

“Indeed, ma’am, ’twas with no discourteous intention, but seeing you were safe with your friends I—­I—­in short, ma’am—­”

Desmond stopped in confusion, at a loss for a satisfactory explanation.  The ladies were smiling.

“You thought to flee our acknowledgments,” said Mrs. Merriman.  “La, la, I know; I have a young brother of my own.  But you shall not escape them now, and what is more, I shall see that Merriman, poor man, adds his, for I am sure he has forgiven you your exploit.”

The younger lady laughed outright, while Desmond looked from one to the other.  What did they mean?

“Indeed, ma’am,” he said, “I had no idea—­”

“That there was need for forgiveness?” said the lady, taking him up.  “But indeed there was-eh, Phyllis?

“Mr. Burke,” she added, with a sudden solemnity, “a few minutes after you left us at Soho Square Merriman rode up, and I assure you I nearly swooned, poor man! and hardly had strength to send for the surgeon.  It needed three stitches—­and he such a handsome man, too.”

A horrid suspicion flashed through Desmond’s mind.  He remembered the scar on Mr. Merriman’s brow, and that it was a scarcely healed wound when he met him with Clive on that unfortunate occasion in Billiter Street.

“Surely, ma’am, you don’t mean—­the highwayman?”

“Indeed I do.  That is just it.  Your highwayman was—­Mr. Merriman.  Fancy the hurt to his feelings, to say nothing of his good looks.  Fie, fie, Mr. Burke!”

For a moment Desmond did not know whether embarrassment or amazement was uppermost with him.  It was bad enough to have tripped Mr. Merriman up in the muddy street; but to have also dealt him a blow of which he would retain the mark to his dying day—­“This is terrible!” he thought.  Still there was an element of absurdity in the adventure that appealed to his sense of the ridiculous.  But he felt the propriety of being apologetic, and was about to express his regret for his mistake when Mrs. Merriman interrupted him with a smile: