CHAPTER XII
The Joy of Interest
The next morning the sun soared radiant. Carleigh, handed his stick by his valet, was conscious, too, of a personal soaring radiance: a condition so unusual and unexpected that it metaphorically struck him in the face.
"Oh, no," he reminded his lovelornity with emphasis, "it cannot possibly be!" Yet he knew joy to be all over him.
Not even the fourteen rare old engravings of early Christian martyrs and their martyrdom, with which the corridor was cheerfully embellished, could dampen his bubbling gaiety.
One cannot, indeed, take much interest in hangings and burnings and other tortures when one is going to have an hour alone in the open with a pretty woman who says things that—as the duke put it—you wouldn't think she would.
In the hall below he found the great black staghound—sole symbol of her mourning—waiting in majestic solitude beside a chair that bore a slender switch of a cane and a rough gray Burberry.
Mrs. Darling, herself, was not there; but the hound, the cane, and the coat—the morning being cold—showed that she had not forgotten her appointment.
Carleigh strolled over to the fire and lighted a cigarette. He felt so delightedly content. Presently his hostess swept quickly in from another room and nodded at him with the good cheer that no one had of late dared exhibit before him.
"You're going out with Nina," she said, evidently well-posted. "We're all driving to lunch with the men in the open. Can't you and she find your way there, too?"