Dinner was announced, and David found himself placed at a round table between the Duchess and Sylvia. The former looked around the banqueting hall with a shiver.
"Reginald," she protested, "why on earth do you plant us in the middle of a vault like this? Why on earth not open up some of the smaller rooms?"
The Marquis smiled deprecatingly. His extreme pallor of the last few days had disappeared. He seemed younger, and his tone was more alert.
"This room is really a weakness of mine," he confessed. "I like a vaulted roof, and I rather like the shadows. It isn't damp, if that is what you are thinking of, Caroline. We have had fires in it ever since we came down--timber being the only thing for which we don't have to pay," he added.
"It makes one feel so insignificant," the Duchess sighed. "If you were dining fifty or sixty people, of course, I should love it, but a dozen of us--why, we seem like spectral mites! Look at old Grand-Uncle Philip staring at us," she went on, gazing at one of the huge pictures opposite. "Pity you cannot afford to have electric light here, Reginald, and have it set in the frames."
"A most unpleasant idea!" her brother objected. "Confess, now, if you could see two rows of ancestors, all illuminated, looking at you while you ate, wouldn't it make you feel greedy?"
The conversation drifted away and became general. The Duchess leaned towards her neighbour.
"I think I am rather sorry I came here," she whispered.
"Because I find you disappointing. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering you upon the steamer. You were delightfully primitive, an absolute cave-dweller, but you quite repaid my efforts to make a human being of you. You were really almost as interesting when we first met in London. And now, I don't know what it is, but you seem to have gone thousands of miles away again. You don't seem properly human. Don't you like women, or have you got some queer scheme in your head which keeps you living like a man with his head in the clouds? Or are you in love?"
"I haven't settled down to idleness yet, perhaps," he suggested.
"Of course," she went on, "you ought to be in love with me, and miserable about it, but I am horribly afraid you aren't. I believe you have matrimonial schemes in your mind. I believe that your affections are so well-trained that they mean to trot all along the broad way to St. George's, Hanover Square."