“Yes—­a great-grandmother.  I let her take the burden of all my sins.”

“Not a very heavy one, I imagine,” he returned, smiling.

“I don’t know.  Sometimes”—­Nan’s eyes grew suddenly pensive—­“sometimes I feel that one day I shall do something which will make the burden too heavy to be shunted on to great-grandmamma!  Then I’ll have to bear it myself, I suppose.”

“There’ll be a pal or two around, to give you a hand with it, I expect,” answered Mallory.

“I don’t know if there will even be that,” she answered dreamily.  “Do you know, I’ve always had the idea that sometime or other I shall get myself into an awful hole and that there won’t be a single soul in the world to get me out of it.”

She spoke with an odd note of prescience in her voice.  It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding communicated itself to Mallory.

“Don’t talk like that.  If you think it, you’ll be carried forward to just such disaster on the current of the thought.  Be sure—­quite, quite sure—­that there will be someone at hand, even if it’s only me”—­quaintly.

“The Good Samaritan again?  But you mightn’t know I was in a difficulty,” she protested.

“I think I should always know if you were in trouble,” he said quietly.

There was a new quality in the familiar lazy drawl—­something that was very strong and steady.  Although he had laid no stress on the word “you,” yet Nan was conscious in every nerve of her that there was an emphatic individual significance in the brief words he had just uttered.  She shied away from it like a frightened colt.

“Still you mightn’t come to the rescue, even if I were struggling in the quicksands,” she answered.

“I should come,” he said deliberately, “whether you wanted me to come or not.”

Followed a brief pause, charged with a curious emotional tensity.  Then Mallory remarked lightly: 

“I enjoyed the Charity Concert at Exeter.”

“Were you there?” exclaimed Nan in surprise.

“Certainly I was there.  When I was as near as Abbencombe, you don’t suppose I was going to miss the chance of hearing you play, do you?”

“I never thought of your being there,” she answered.

“And now that I know you’ve French blood in your veins, I can understand what always puzzled me in your playing.”

“What was that?”

“The un-English element in it.”

Nan smiled.

“Am I too unreserved then?” she shot at him.

His grey-blue eyes smiled back at her.

“One doesn’t ask reserve of a musician.  He must give himself—­as you do.”

She flushed a little.  The man’s perception was unerring.

“As no Englishwoman could,” he pursued.  “We English aren’t dramatic—­it’s bad form, you know.”

“‘We’ English?” repeated Nan.  “That hardly applies to you, does it?”

“My mother is French.  But I’m very English in most ways,” he returned quickly.  Adding, with a good-humoured laugh:  “I’m a disappointment to my mother.”