For that was what it came to--plainly.

Did she know what had happened?
Had her swoon blotted it all out?
If so, was he justified in revealing it.

There was an uneasy feeling that it would be more chivalrous towards her, and kinder towards his sister, if he left the veil drawn, seeing that she seemed to wish it so--if he said no more about her fright, her danger, her faint.

But Manisty was not accustomed to let himself be governed by the scruples of men more precise or more timid.

He wished passionately to force a conversation with her more intimate, more personal than any one had yet allowed him; to break down at a stroke most if not all of the barriers that separate acquaintance from-- From what?
He stood, cigarette in hand, staring blindly at the garden, lost in an intense questioning of himself.
Suddenly he found himself back again, as it were, among the feelings and sensations of Lucy Foster's first Sunday at the villa; his repugnance towards any notion of marriage; his wonder that anybody should suppose that he had any immediate purpose of marrying Eleanor Burgoyne; the mood, half lazy, half scornful, in which he had watched Lucy, in her prim Sunday dress, walking along the avenue.
What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so unacquainted with his world?
There was her beauty of course.