The girl bent down, and spread out her arms to the glow. She let them fall on the front of her skirt, pressing it back from the little pink and gold slippers on the grate stone.
"What a man you are for fires!" she said.
"You know you don't care tuppence," she said; but she threw the cloak at last from her shoulders, and leaned back in the chair, drooping an admiring eye. She was on her way to the great costume ball of the season, and forced from South a hazard at her masquerade.
"Apple blossom?" he ventured, and was complimented.
"Ah, you should see it standing up; but you're not worth that. Look there!"
She spread out the phantom of a fan, shaped and painted as a tuft of its tinted bloom.
"Ye-es, he did. Are you sorry for Veynes?"
"Oh, do be sensible!--you're not that much of a fool;--because I've got him, or he's got me, whichever you like. Don't you think it's bad for him?"
"Thank you. It might, you know; 'specially with Veynes. Oh, I say, do you mind my coming here?"
"I can mind nothing else for days," he laughed. "Why?"
"I thought your man looked a sort of piled-up disapproval when he let me in."
"Oh, he's probably seen my face too often in shop windows to care to see it here. You're all deadly respectable, aren't you?"
"The whole square is; we've taken life policies in propriety. Money, art and titles, and all of it married."
She gave a little wince at that, but asked if he would offer her some coffee. South was famous in a small way for making it, and his friends, when out of humor with the world, would come and watch the brown liquid bubble through the valves of some strange machine of copper and nacreous glass he had picked up in the East, and regain their "values" over a cup.
He pushed a hanging kettle across the flame, and knelt down by his visitor to stir the fire.
"That's the gritty stuff, isn't it? No, the other; and black. Why is your hair so long?"
"Is it? I've forgotten it. What is this on your shoe?"
She swept her train across her little feet and laughed at him.
"Are you learning to be inquisitive?" she inquired.
South did not say. He lifted the kettle from its crutch, and set the _cafetière_ in action.
Rosamond screwed her chair round to the table, and spread her arms upon it, resting her cheek on one of them to watch his proceedings.