"Cecil is most reasonable—I did not hope as much as this," she told Sophy. Then she took her departure, adding:
"And now I must set the Town talking the way we wish."
It had been agreed between her and Sophy that she should spread reports to the effect that Cecil was suffering from an attack of inflammation of the brain. She had submitted this idea to Dr. Hopkins yesterday, and he had agreed that it was wise and permissible under the circumstances.
Lady Wychcote was a clever woman. She set this report going with such skill and so apt a measure of detail that even the sceptical Olive Arundel was quite taken in by it. The people who chiefly mattered, and those who had been present at the painful dinner, were only too glad to accept such a solution of the disgraceful scene. Only Oswald Tyne smiled behind Lady Wychcote's well-preserved and still girlish back, his mocking, unctuous smile, and said: "I would rather dream of the degrading spectacle of a British plum-pudding served in flames at an Athenian banquet than see again at a London feast the brain of an Englishman thus ignited. Both are too massive to burn gracefully. But the plum-pudding has a lightness—a delicacy—a wholesomeness—which the British cerebrum even in flames can never accomplish."
Olive, to whom Tyne made these remarks, exclaimed, much vexed:
"Oswald! You are bwutal. You are never funny when you are bwutal."
"On the contrary," he assured her gravely, "I am a Celt. I am always funny when I am brutal. Your Englishman, now, is always brutal when he is funny."
"Oh, don't try to be witty with every breath!" she cried crossly. "I think it heartless of you, and that poor man was in danger of his life at the very moment he said that awful thing!"
"Indeed he was," said Tyne earnestly. "I know that I had clutched my knife with red slaughter hissing at my ear. Several men who were present have confessed the same thing to me. The vice of self-control was all that restrained us."
"At any rate," she said earnestly, seeing that it was hopeless to get at his serious side through sympathy for Cecil, "at any rate, you like poor dear Sophy, don't you?"