"Well . . ." The suppliant accents of a child caught misbehaving confessed: "you know I've always been crazy about emeralds."
Lanyard let a little space of silence be eloquent for him. When he spoke again it was in another tone, rather a brusque one: "But why the devil did you do that?"
"Oh, I don't know!" Folly sighed in plaintive resentment of such bullying. "He kept asking me, and I didn't know what else to do . . . You weren't there, and I was lonely, and it was raining . . ."
With the portentous sweep of a sorcerer's wand one wing of the screen doors nearby swung wide to deliver to Lanyard's stunned recognition the last person in the world he had cared to see just then, a presence of florid allurement en grande toilette. He rose in resignation, telling himself he might have been better prepared, would have been had Folly's most recent confidence broken upon his understanding with force less scandalizing--that the interruption was after all timely, since beyond doubt it saved him from speaking his mind too plainly on the theme of Morphew as a husband meet for Folly.
The woman at the doorway waited a moment for her vision to accomodate itself to the change of light, then marked him where he stood by the settee and approached with a carriage whose measured grace matched the play of the fantastic fan of plumes she managed, her fine body sinuously undulant within its scanty sheath of lace and satin.
"It is you at last, my friend. One fancied it was your car one heard. . . . But how long since last we met!"
"Too long," Lanyard gallantly insisted, performing a punctilious bow over a hand whose fingers tightened upon his with a significance unsentimental, a brief sharp squeeze that carried a clear message to his discretion: Folly, he was to understand, knew nothing, and Liane for reasons personal and sufficient held it wise she should continue to know nothing, of that ill-fated flight of theirs together to the Bahamas.
By way of supplement the throaty voice pursued with heavier stress on the note of professional blandishment: "It is true, then, you have missed me?"
"Ah!" Lanyard gave back agreeably to her humour--"if you only knew!"
"Hark to that grand blageur!" Liane grumbled to Folly. "Who would believe, to hear him, the last time we met he coldly spurned my love? But it is always so with him, one never knows how to take this fickle animal. Heed what I tell you, who have suffered: do not let him break your heart, too."