To-day, as always when he had seen her, she seemed ready for any possible social emergency. She could have stepped from her veranda, with those wonderfully cut little white shoes, into the smartest of garden-parties, or have received in her shimmering cavern the unexpected visit of a royal personage; and her soft white linen with its heavy Italian embroideries clotted, like thick cream, about the hem and wrists and breast, would have been as exquisitely appropriate as it was to this empty afternoon of reverie.
She was a small, very shapely woman, soft and curved and compact. Her coiffure would have looked old-fashioned in its artifice and elegance, and with its “royal fringe,” were it not for its air of a rightness as unquestionable as that of some foreign princess’s, who kept and did not follow fashions. Mrs. Dallas’s face, too, was small and colourless and slightly faded; her hair was of a lighter brown than her arched eyebrows and her melancholy and dissatisfied eyes; her eyelids, tinged with a dusky mauve, drooped heavily and made her always look a little sleepy; the smiling line of her full-lipped yet minute mouth was ironic rather than mirthful. To have called it a bewitching or an alluring face would have been to imply a mobility it did not possess; but it was potent through its very passivity; it was provocative through its profound and slumbrous indifference.
There was certainly no hint of allurement in the glance she turned on Rupert Wilson as he came round the corner of the veranda; it was, indeed, even to his rapt preoccupation, a little harder in its quiet attentiveness than usual; yet she smiled at him, and her smile was always sweet, holding out a languid hand in silence and leaving it to him to say, “You expected me.”
It was hardly a question, and Mrs. Dallas gave it no answer. He had, indeed, come to see her every day for many weeks now. But yesterday had finished the novel, and to-day was almost the first they had had without some definite programme of reading.
Rupert sat down on the steps of the veranda at her feet and took off his hat and looked out across the carnations; and since she said nothing, he, too, was silent, and to his trembling young heart the silence was full of new avowals.
Colonel Dallas’s smoking-room also opened on the veranda, and as they sat there he came out. He was a tall, heavy man, with large pale cheeks drooping on either side of a white moustache, and a gloomy eye that could become fretful. He cast now a glance that was only gloomy at his wife and her companion.
“Beastly hot day,” he said, to her rather than to Rupert. “It’s worse in the house than out, I think.”
“Are you going over to the Trotters' for tea and croquet?” his wife inquired.
“To the Trotters'? Why should I go to the Trotters'?”
“They asked you, and you accepted.”