The little group fell on a sudden silence, a silence that the steady thud of the tennis balls, the call of the scores, the applause, did not touch. A shadow seemed to cross the sunbathed lawns and brilliant flower-beds. There were others whom they all remembered, of whom no one would ever ask for news again.
Riversley got up and carried the empty cups back to the tea-table. Then he stood and watched the tennis for a little space.
His mind moved heavily, but he was conscious that, in spite of all the momentum given by a great reaction, it would not be so easy as of old to make a business of pleasure.
Presently he slipped away to the peace and seclusion of his father-in-law’s study. It was a long low room, lined from floor to ceiling with books. North’s writing-table stood in one window, the other opened on to the lawn, while a further means of escape was afforded by a second door at the end of the room opening into his laboratory. In the great armchair guarding the hearth slept respectively Larry and Victoria, the little lady fox-terrier who owned Roger North. Between Vic and Larry there existed a curious compact, immovable apparently as the laws of the Medes and Persians. Each had a share of the room on which the other never encroached, and Larry possessed certain privileges, plainly conceded by Victoria, with regard to North, beyond which he never went. In all other matters the two were fast friends, and had been so long before Larry came to live at Westwood. Lady Condor’s West Highlanders they tolerated in the garden, but never in the house. Both dogs greeted Riversley with effusion, and the heavy, silent young man sat with Victoria on his knee and Larry at his feet, surrounding himself with clouds of smoke and stroking the little sleek head against his arm.
Presently North joined him. “You are staying the night?” he asked, accepting a proffered cigar.
“No.” Riversley emptied his pipe of ashes and began to refill it.
“I’ve made the excuse of business in London,” he went on after that little pause. “I think Vi wants a change from—everything.”
There was another pause, but still North did not speak. He understood this stolid and apparently rather ordinary young man better than most people did. He knew the difficulty with which he spoke of things that touched him deeply, things that really mattered. So he lit his cigar and passed the light in silence, and presently Riversley went on again.
“You see, I still think Vi did the best thing she could, under the circumstances, when she married me,” he said, “but even so it has not been the success I hoped it would have been. There’s something wrong. Something more than having to put up with me instead of a chap like old Dick. It was a knock-down blow losing him, but Vi was damned plucky over that, and it doesn’t account for——”
“What?” asked North, sharply this time, when the usual pause came.