"Like that of good women," growled Nibbetts.
Lady Bellingdown, coming forward in the hall to meet them, overheard: "Is he ballyragging you again, dear?" she asked, while Nina lifted her veil for the impending greeting. "He's quite impossible."
"He's ballyragging the sex. We shall have to combine to crush him."
"Women will never combine on anything," was his gruff comment. "They're too jealous of one another. The fight for suffrage is foredoomed."
Nina and Kitty kissed and said sweet things to each other, and the viscount turned away with a sneer and a scowl.
"There's always plenty of seed-cake here," whispered the duke, finding a place beside Nina at tea. "Very good seed-cake, too. Much better than at Puddlewood. Let me help you to some."
He put a piece on her plate and she leaned over to get something quite confidential from the duchess, who sat on the end of the lounge nearest the fire. "Even if I am English I want to be warm," was a _bon mot_ of her youth, still quoted, and still being lived up to.
"I've the very latest word in the Carleigh affair," she whispered behind her hand, with a stolen glance toward Lady Bellingdown, who was busy over the teacups. "Come to my room before dinner and I'll tell you."
Nina nodded, and then the two chattered commonplace for a moment to throw off suspicion. When Nina sat up again her seed-cake was gone and the duke was chuckling.
"But where is it?" she asked, perplexity in her violet eyes.
His grace pointed to the floor at her farther side. Tara was lying there. "He's yours, I suppose. He took the seed-cake at a gulp. Fine staghound that. I had a pair like him once. I say, Doody, didn't I have a fine pair of black staghounds once?"
"Yes, Pucketts." That was the duke's nickname from the cradle.
"Everything's foxhounds nowadays. But when I was younger," he went on--and on--and on.
Nina, delighted to see the animal once more, was caressing his long ears and mumbling baby-talk to him.
In the privacy of the guest-suite she occupied the duchess smoked one cigarette after another and told Nina Darling that it was Sir Caryll himself who had broken the engagement at the last minute, and not the prospective mother-in-law, as the world had it.
"But why? I thought he was madly in love with the girl."