“Tea! Is it five o’clock? What can have happened? Pray ring. The misery I have to endure with servants! I wonder my hair isn’t even greyer than it is, and my poor face more worn.”
“Your hair is as brown as a nut, and there isn’t a crease in your dear, soft young face. What was wrong with you when I came in, the corners of your mouth were turned the wrong way?”
“Ah, it was Gwen, she has thrown aside another most unexceptionable match, the third in three months.”
“Gwen Waring, she is with me for the season.”
“Ah, that queer, sulky, imperturbable, long-legged girl, belonging to those wonderful young fossils at Waring Park. I shouldn’t have thought she’d have got the chance to throw over any match, let alone three unexceptionable ones——”
A tall superb girl with a face like a hothouse flower, was standing in the middle of the room, looking at him with a cool aloofness that made his blood run cold. She had heard every word, she must have, his voice was a big one.
This magnificent dominant creature, before whom he felt as a worm, was only an enlarged completed edition of the “sulky, long-legged” slip he used to catch fitful glances of, in his stays with his aunt.
If only he hadn’t classified her in such cool pleasant tones! It was not often the fellow felt at such a disadvantage. If the girl had made a joke now, or even looked as if she could make one! But she knew better than to joke, she had her tactics ready to her hand, and she was determined his impertinence should be brought home to him.
Her own classification never troubled her in the least, it was the good-humoured sneer at her parents which touched her. Was she always to suffer for being the product of such a house?
The next few minutes Strange felt younger than he had done for ten years.
“Lady Mary has been telling me of your good fortune,” she remarked kindly, sipping her tea, and looking at him in as motherly a way as so very splendid a person could look. “You must be quite excited—I suppose you are already making a hundred plans?
“I seem to know you quite well,” she went on, not giving him the chance to reply, “Lady Mary is always telling anecdotes of ‘her boy’, very entertaining ones they are too, and I should fancy characteristic.”