OTHER! I've forgotten a most important chap. Jake d'Egremont, 200 Jermyn Street. Do put him down!"
"What an odd name. Do I know him, Robin?"
"He came to lunch one day—just before we left town. But I think you were out" Lord Ardvilly hesitated, just a perceptible moment, and the Duchess, who was very quick, noticed that hesitation.
"He's more a friend of Susie's than of mine," he observed.
"I wish I were better acquainted with some of your friends, and your sister's friends, darling boy," she said wistfully.
She and her eldest son were making out a list of guests, young and old, for their first September house-party.
"Of the five young men whose names I've just put down I only know one to speak to," she went on.
"Life in London is such a rush," he said penitently. "Also, you're so awfully busy, mother."
"Never too busy to care very much about anything that concerns you and your sister, my dear. But now to go back to this friend of Susie's. Is he tall, dark, clean-shaven, with very bright blue eyes?"
"Yes, that describes him exactly! Then you have seen him, mother?"
"If it's the man I mean he was at the Kent House ball, and I noticed that he danced a good many times with your sister."
The Duchess was remembering, with a slight feeling of retrospective discomfort, the admiring, caressing look that a tall dark man, whose name she now knew to be d'Egremont, had cast on her lovely little débutante daughter. The two had been sitting out on a balcony, far from the ball-room, and they had remained unaware both of her approach and of her retreat.
"Now I've got down nine of your and Susie's friends; Mr. Davenant for me; and"
"—'the Marchioness' for father?" her son slyly ended the sentence.
The Duchess smiled. The Duke was a man of strong prejudices, and he very much disliked his cousin by marriage, Lady St. Yves, who, according to malicious gossip, was fond of describing herself as "the Marchioness."
"Your father will be here only for the Monday of our party. I think he ought to put up with having her once next him at dinner!"
"I wish she wasn't coming," grumbled the young man, "she's so purse-proud and pompous."
"Poor Gertie! I heard someone say the other day that she was like a poultice gone cold."
"Mother—how perfect! I must tell that to"
"No, indeed—you mustn't tell anybody that, dear boy! Surely you don't repeat the little things I tell you?"
She looked up into his face with a half-laughing, half-frightened look. "Padlocks!" she cried.
As he bent down and kissed her, "Padlocks, of course," he murmured.
And then he went on: "I know Gertie's a good sort really. But 'a poultice gone cold'? I call that a stroke of genius!"
He was leaving the charming flower-filled old-fashioned sitting-room which was still called her Grace's boudoir, when suddenly he turned round.
"Padlocks, too, about Susie and d'Egremont, eh, mother? Susie would be awfully cross if she knew I had told you he was a 'special' of hers."
"Why should she be?"
"She shouldn't be, but Susie's like that, you know."
Susie's mother did know that Susie was "like that," and she sighed a rather sad sigh as she began writing her notes of invitation. The girl, now just over eighteen, was reserved and sensitive; secretive, too, about trifles of no importance. Now and again she treated the Duchess more like an unloved governess than as an almost over-loving, over-tender mother.
" I look at some of those rouged, powdered, lip-sticked young things, so different from what I used to be, it makes me feel so ancient—such a 'has been,'" observed the Duchess, in a melancholy tone, as she rubbed her soft, unlined, unpowdered cheek on her husband's sleeve.
The two were standing in what was called the Musicians' Gallery. It was a queer dark little recess with one side opening on to the great hall, on whose floor, some forty feet below, were now dancing some ten to twelve couples.
"You always talk as if you were old. If you're old, what am I?" observed the Duke.
For a moment his wife made no answer to that remark. She was picking out her own children among the dancers in the great hall below. Yes, with one exception, there they all were, even to the youngest of them who was still, to her own indignation, for she was eight years old, called Lady Baby. She had been allowed to stay up because the joyous party was breaking up very early the day after to-morrow....
The Duchess's heart flew to the one child who was not there, her eldest daughter, Lady Lettice Arbuthnot, who had married last year, and lived far away in the North of England.