"I got your letter, Andrew," she said, "in which you proposed to call
upon me this afternoon. I am leaving town. I am on my way back to New
York, as a matter of fact, and I shall have left the hotel by midday, so
you see I have come to visit you instead."
"It is very kind," he answered.
She shrugged her shoulders and looked disparagingly around the plainly
furnished man's sitting room.
"Not much altered here," she remarked. "It looks just as it did when I
used to come to tea with you before we were married."
"The neighbourhood is a conservative one," he replied. "Still, I must
confess that I am glad I never gave the rooms up. I don't think that
nature intended me to dwell in palaces."
"Perhaps not," she agreed, a little insolently. "It is a habit of yours
to think and live parochially. Now what did you want of me, please?"
"There is a scheme on foot," he began, "to bring about my political
ruin."
"You don't mean to tell me," she exclaimed, with a sudden light in her
eyes, "that you, my well-behaved Andrew, have been playing around? You
are not going to be a corespondent or any-thing of that sort?"
"I used the word 'political,'" he reminded her coldly.
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