He looks up at her then and finds what looks to him like annoyance. It's better than pity, but not by much, and he'd still rather sink down into the floorboards.

But he's here, and she's looking at him with a kind of frustrated expectation, and he does owe her a response. She deserves that much, after all she's done for him tonight.

"You'd like to be as discreet as possible, and you'd particularly like it if your brother had no idea," he says...and when he puts it like that, there's no reason whatsoever to be upset about it. Those are perfectly sensible desires to have. This is all a matter of bruised ego, and he's being an idiot - but that doesn't mean the bruise doesn't still ache. "Unless I've misunderstood."