ilt of whatever crime I was supposed to
have committed. If I ever wished to justify my perfect innocence, I should
forfeit my chances, at once, by accepting the snub I had received. To do
that would be to acknowledge my sense of misbehaviour.

I leaned a little forward and glanced at Miss Tattersall who was sitting
just beyond Nora Bailey on my side of the table. And I saw that my late
confidante, the user of keyholes, was faintly smiling to herself with an
unmistakable air of malicious satisfaction.

I wished, then, that I had not looked. I was no longer quite so conscious
of outraged innocence. It is true that I was guiltless of any real
offence, but I saw that the charge of complicity with the chauffeur--a
charge that had certainly not lost in substance or in its suggestion of
perfidy by Miss Tattersall's rendering--was one that I could not wholly
refute. I was in the position of a man charged with murder on good
circumstantial evidence; and my first furious indignation began to give
way to a detestable feeling of embarrassment, momentarily increased by the
necessity to sit in silence while the inane chatter of the luncheon table
swerved past me. If I had had one friend with whom I could have talked, I
might have been able to recover myself, but I defy any one in my situation
to maintain an effective part with no active means of expression.

I glanced a trifle desperately at Olive Jervaise. I judged her to be
rather a colourless creature who would not have the spirit openly to snub
me. She was nearly opposite to me, between her brother and Hughes, and
well placed for an open attack if I could once engage her attention. But
when I came to consider an opening, every reasonably appropriate topic
seemed to have some dangerous relation to the _affaire Brenda_. Any
reference to the dance, to the Sturtons, the place, the weather, suddenly
assumed in my mind the appearance of a subtle approach to the subject I
most wished to avoid. If I was, indeed, regarded in that house as a spy in
league with the enemy, the most innocent remark might be construed into an
attempt to obtain evidence.

I fancy, too, that I was subject to an influence other than the heightened
self-consciousness due to my awkward situation. I had only just begun to
realise that the absence of Brenda must be a horribly insistent fact to
her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her
vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the ne