“I am going back too,” he said. “Pray allow me the pleasure of accompanying you. Will you take my arm? You look surprised at seeing me!”

I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses that came back was the sense that warned me to sacrifice anything rather than make an enemy of him.

“You look surprised at seeing me!” he repeated in his quietly pertinacious way.

“I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room,” I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could.