Barbara put out a small hand to detain him. Her face was very grave and there were traces of tears about her eyes.
“Alec,” she said in a low voice, “I’ve got rather bad news for you. Something very dreadful has happened—something that I can’t possibly tell you about, so please don’t ask me, dear; it would only make me more unhappy still. But I can’t be engaged to you any longer. You must just forget that yesterday ever happened at all. It’s out of the question now. Alec I—I can’t marry you.”
CHAPTER II.
An Interrupted Breakfast
Mr. Victor Stanworth, the host of the little party now in progress at Layton Court, was, according to the reports of his friends, who were many and various, a thoroughly excellent sort of person. What his enemies thought about him—that is, provided that he had any—is not recorded. On the face of it, at any rate, however, the existence of the latter may be doubted. Genial old gentlemen of sixty or so, somewhat more than comfortably well off, who keep an excellent cellar and equally excellent cigars and entertain with a large-hearted good humour amounting almost to open-handedness, are not the sort of people to have enemies. And all that Mr. Victor Stanworth was; that, and, perhaps, a trifle more.
If he had one noticeable failing—so slight that it could hardly be called a fault—it was perhaps the rather too obvious interest he displayed in the sort of people whose pictures get into the illustrated weeklies. Not that Mr. Stanworth was a snob, or anything approaching it; he would as soon exchange a joke with a dustman as a duke, though it is possible that he would prefer a millionaire to either. But he had not attempted to conceal his satisfaction when his younger brother, now dead these ten years or more, had succeeded in marrying (against all expectation and the more than plainly expressed wishes of the lady’s family) Lady Cynthia Anglemere, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Grassingham. Indeed, he had gone so far as to express his approval in the eminently satisfactory form of settling a thousand a year on the lady in question for so long as she continued to bear the name of Stanworth. It is noticeable, however, that a condition of the settlement was the provision that she should continue the use of her title also. Gossip, of course, hinted that this interest sprung from the fact that the origins of the Stanworth family were themselves not all that they might be; but whether there was any truth in this or not, it was beyond question that, whatever these origins might be, they were by now so decently interred in such a thick shroud of golden obscurity that nobody had had either the wish or the patience to uncover them.
Mr. Stanworth was a bachelor, and it was generally understood that he was a person of some little importance in that mysterious Mecca of finance, the City. Anything further than that was not specified, a closer definition being rightly held to be unnecessary. But the curious could find, if they felt so minded, the name of Mr. Stanworth on the board of directors of several small but flourishing and thoroughly respectable little concerns whose various offices were scattered within a half-mile radius of the Mansion House. In any case these did not seem to make any such exorbitant demands on Mr. Stanworth’s time as to exclude a full participation in the more pleasant occupations of life. Two or three days a week in London in the winter, with sometimes as few as one a fortnight during the summer, appeared to be quite enough not only to preserve his financial reputation among his friends, but also to maintain that large and healthy income which was a source of such innocent pleasure to so many.
It has been said already that Mr. Stanworth was in the habit of entertaining both largely and broad-mindedly; and this is no less than the truth. It was his pleasure to gather round him a select little party of entertaining and cheerful persons, usually young ones. And each year he rented a different place in the summer for this purpose; the larger, the older, and possessing the longer string of aristocratic connections, the better. The winter months he passed either abroad or in his comfortable bachelor flat in St. James’s Street.
This year his choice of a summer residence had fallen upon Layton Court, with its Jacobean gables, its lattice windows, and its oak-panelled rooms. Mr. Stanworth was thoroughly satisfied with Layton Court. He had been installed there for rather more than a month, and the little party now in full swing was the second of the summer’s series. His sister-in-law, Lady Stanworth, always acted as hostess for him on these occasions.
Neither Roger nor Alec had had any previous acquaintance with their host; and their inclusion in the party had been due to a chain of circumstances. Mrs. Shannon, an old friend of Lady Stanworth’s, had been asked in the first place; and with her Barbara. Then Mr. Stanworth had winked jovially at his sister-in-law and observed that Barbara was getting a deuced pretty girl in these days, and wasn’t there any particular person she would be glad to see at Layton Court, eh? Lady Stanworth had given it as her opinion that Barbara might not be displeased to encounter a certain Mr. Alexander Grierson about the place; whereupon Mr. Stanworth, having ascertained in a series of rapid questions that Mr. Alexander Grierson was a young man of considerable worldly possessions (which interested him very much), had played cricket three years running for Oxford (which interested him still more), and was apparently a person of unimpeachable character and morals (which did not interest him at all), had given certain injunctions; with the result that two days later Mr. Alexander Grierson received a charming little note, to which he had hastened to reply with gratified alacrity. As to Roger, it had come somehow to Mr. Stanworth’s ears (as in fact things had a habit of doing) that he was a close friend of Alec’s; and there was always room in any house which happened to be occupied by Mr. Stanworth for a person of the world-wide reputation and attainments of Roger Sheringham. A second charming little note had followed in the wake of the first.
Roger had been delighted with Mr. Stanworth. He was a man after his own heart, this jolly old gentleman, with his interesting habit of pressing half-crown cigars and pre-war whiskey on one at all hours of the day from ten in the morning onwards; his red, genial face, always on the point of bursting into loud, whole-hearted laughter if not actually doing so; his way of poking sly fun at his dignified, aristocratic sister-in-law; and the very faint trace of a remote vulgarity about him that only seemed, in his particular case, to add a more intimate, almost a more genuine note to his dealings with one. Yes, Roger had found old Mr. Stanworth a character well worth studying. In the three days since they had first met their acquaintance had developed rapidly into something that was very near to friendship.