"Thanks, I won't have any tea. I did not mean your sister: I meant Miss Lesley—I thought I saw her as I came in."
"Anything important?" said Caspar, blandly. He was certain that Lesley had gone away to cry—women always cry!—and he did not want her to be disturbed. Although he had quarrelled with his wife, he understood feminine susceptibilities better than most men.
"Oh, no. Only to ask her to sing at the Club on Sunday. It's my turn to manage the music for that day, you know. Trent is going to sing too."
"Ah," said Mr. Brooke. Then, after a pause: "I will ask her. But I don't think she will be able to sing on Sunday. It strikes me she has an engagement."
He could not say to Ethel's brother what was in his mind, and yet he was troubled by the intensity of his conviction that she was throwing herself away upon "a cad." He must take some other method in the future of giving Maurice a hint about young Trent.
Maurice thought, not untruly, that there was something odd in his tone.
"Isn't she well?" he asked, with his usual straightforwardness. "I hope there is nothing wrong."
"I did not say there was anything wrong, did I?" demanded Caspar. Then, squaring his shoulders, and sitting well back in his chair, with his hands plunged into the pockets of his old study coat, and his eyes fixed on his visitor's face, he thus acquitted himself—"Maurice, my young friend, I am and have been a most confounded ass."
"Oh?" said Maurice, interrogatively.
"I think it would relieve me—if I weren't out of practice—to swear. But I've preached against 'langwidge' so long at the club that I don't think I could get up the necessary stock of expletives."