Whatever surprise he may have felt he did not show.
"Hullo!" Reggie said, turning round, and looking a little foolish. He raised a finger to his fair, smooth hair, in mock-respectful salutation.
"Oh, it's you!" Sir Francis said, and paid the young brother no further attention.
The very opposite in manner to the ever-popular Reggie, with his easy manners and his never-failing good temper, Sir Francis, cool, reserved, spare of speech, and in uncongenial society, truth to tell, unconquerably shy, was a difficult person with whom to make talk. He said a few constrained words to Bessie, with whose presence on the scene he had not reckoned any more than with that of his brother; and Bessie, struggling valiantly to appear at ease with him, and failing utterly, answered them according to her kind.
Bessie was afraid he felt it so in this stuffy, airless street.
"But you are delightfully in the shade here."
Bessie, straightening her back and pouting her vivid lips, told how the weather made her long for a garden, a river, and waving trees, or the sea-shore.
"Or anything you can't get," Sir Francis commented to himself, looking with distaste at the plump, foolish, pink and white face of the young woman with whom he had been entrapped into intercourse. "You have some roses, I see," he said aloud.
"They are sent to me," smiled a conscious Bessie. She did not consider herself to be lying. What was sent to Deleah she continued to persuade herself was intended for her.
"I know whose money goes for that," Sir Francis inwardly ejaculated. He glanced at his brother, hanging his foolish head from the window again. "I'm glad I came, after all. I'll put a stop to this," he resolved.
"Your gardens at Cashelthorpe must be charming now, Sir Francis."
Sir Francis admitted without emotion that they were charming.
"That's why you're leaving them, and going off to Scotland next week," Reggie supposed, drawing in his head from the window.
"It must be delightful to travel," gushed Bessie, seizing on the topic. She exacted a programme from him, punctuated by her "Delightful! Delightful!" of the places he was intending to visit.
And so for a few minutes, Bessie struggling with all her poor wits to do so, they kept up a painfully lagging conversation. And all the time the poor girl was desperately supplying improbable, and impossible reasons to account to herself for the bewildering fact of his visit; all the time Sir Francis was wondering how quickly without incivility he could get away; all the time Reggie, as he watched for the figure of Deleah coming down the street, was muttering to himself, "He's on my track again, hang him!"