"Of course. I wrote Frances a steamer letter the day before yesterday. You got in this morning with them then? They said not a word of your coming when I last heard from them."
"I only decided to join them at the last minute. I thought that it would be good fun to drop upon you like this, so I didn't write. It is good to see you again." Sir Basil, while his beam seemed to include the room and its inmates, included them unseeingly; he had eyes, it was evident, only for her. He went on to give her messages from the Pakenhams, in New York but for a week on their way to Canada and eager to see her at once. They would have come with him had they not been rather knocked up by the early rise on the steamer and by the long wait at the custom-house.
"You must all come with me to-morrow to our tableaux," said Valerie. "Imogen is in them. She is out this afternoon, so you will see her for the first time at her loveliest. She is to be Antigone."
"Oh, so I sha'n't see her till to-morrow. I've always been a bit afraid of
Miss Upton, you know," said Sir Basil, with a smile at Jack.
"Well, the first impression will be a reassuring one," said Valerie.
"Antigone is the least alarming of heroines."
"I don't know about that," Sir Basil objected, folding a slice of bread and butter, "A bit gruesome, don't you think?"
"Gruesome?"
"She stuck so to her own ideas, didn't she? Awfully rough on the poor fellow who wanted to marry her, insisting like that on burying her brothers."
Valerie laughed. "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would have been horridly gruesome to have left her brothers unburied."
"You'll worst me in an argument, of course," Sir Basil replied, looking fondly at her; "but I maintain that she's a dreary young lady. Of course I don't mean to say that she wasn't an exceedingly good girl, and all that sort of thing, but a bit of a prig, you must allow."