"Oh, we all know you are a clairvoyante in heart episodes, my dear mother; they are the one business of your life!" smiled Carruthers, setting down his ice, and lounging across the lawn to a group of cedars, where Flora Montolieu stood playing at croquet, and who, like a scheming adventuress, as she was, immediately verified Lady Marabout's words, and piqued Goodwood à outrance by avowing herself tired of the game, and entering with animated verve into the prophecies for Ascot with Carruthers, whose bay filly Sunbeam, sister to Wild-Falcon, was entered to run for the Queen's Cup.
"What an odd smile that was of Philip's," thought Lady Marabout, left to herself and her Orange Pekoe. "He has been very intimate with Goodwood ever since they joined the Blues, cornets together, three-and-twenty years ago; surely he can't have heard him drop anything that would make him fancy he was _not serious_?"
An idle fear, which Lady Marabout dismissed contemptuously from her mind when she saw how entirely Goodwood--in defiance of the Hauttons' sneer, the drowsy Duchess's unconcealed frown, all the comments sure to be excited in feminine minds, and all the chaff likely to be elicited from masculine lips at the mess-table, and in the U. S., and in the Guards' box before the curtain went up for the ballet--vowed himself to the service of the little detrimental throughout that morning party, and spoke a temporary adieu, whose tenderness, if she did not exactly catch, Lady Marabout could at least construe, as he pulled up the tiger-skin over Flora's dainty dress, before the Marabout carriage rolled down the Fulham Road to town. At which tenderness of farewell Carruthers--steeled to all such weaknesses himself--gave a disdainful glance and a contemptuous twist of his moustaches, as he stood by the door talking to his mother.
"You too, Phil?" said Goodwood, with a laugh, as the carriage rolled away.
Carruthers stared at him haughtily, as he will stare at his best friends if they touch his private concerns more nearly than he likes; a stare which said disdainfully, "I don't understand you," and thereby told the only lie to which Carruthers ever stooped in the whole course of his existence.
"If you poach on my manor _here_, I shall kill you Phil; so _gare à vous_!"