"I suppose you are," he said through his white teeth. The idea seemed to amuse him. "We may meet there. I've promised to run over for a few days if I can."
"The deuce you have!" would have expressed his companion's feelings; but Lord Semingham only said, "Oh, really?"
"All right, I'm coming directly," Ruston cried a moment later to his young friends, and, with a friendly nod, he rose and went on his way. Lord Semingham watched the party till it disappeared through the Park gates, hearing in turn the children's shrill laugh and Willie Ruston's deeper notes. The effect of the chance meeting was to make his fancies and his fancied feelings look still more absurd. That he perceived at once; the devil appeared so very human in such a mood and such surroundings. Yet that attribute—that most demoniac attribute—of ubiquity loomed larger and larger. For not even a foreign land—not even a watering-place of pronounced frivolity—was to be a refuge. The man was coming to Dieppe! And on whose bidding? Semingham had no doubt on whose bidding; and, out of the airy forms of those absurd fancies, there seemed to rise a more material shape, a reality, a fabric not compounded wholly of dreams, but mixed of stuff that had made human comedies and human tragedies since the world began. Mrs. Dennison had bidden Willie Ruston to Dieppe. That was Semingham's instant conclusion; she had bidden him, not merely by a formal invitation, or by a simple acquiescence, but by the will and determination which possessed her to be of his mind and in his schemes. And perhaps Evan Haselden's innocent asking of her views had carried its weight also. For nearly an hour Semingham sat and mused. For awhile he thought he would act; but how should he act? And why? And to what end? Since what must be must, and in vain do we meddle with fate. An easy, almost eager, recognition of the inevitable in the threatened, of the necessary in everything that demanded effort for its avoidance, had stamped his life and grown deep into his mind. Wherefore now, faced with possibilities that set his nerves on edge, and wrung his heart for good friends, he found nothing better to do than shrug his shoulders and thank God that his own wife's submission to the man went no deeper than the inside lining of that famous Omofaga mantle, nor his own than the bottom, or near the bottom, of his trousers' pocket.
"Though that, in faith," he exclaimed ruefully, as at last he rose, "is, in this world of ours, pretty deep!"
CHAPTER X.
A LADY'S BIT OF WORK.
The Dennison children, after a two nights' banishment, had come down to dessert again. They had been in sore disgrace, caused (it was stated to Mrs. Cormack, who had been invited to dine en famille) by a grave breach of hospitality and good manners which Madge had led the younger ones—who tried to look plaintively innocent—into committing.
The Carlin children had come to tea, and a great dissension had arisen between the two parties. The Carlins had belauded the generous donor of ices; Madge had taken up the cudgels fiercely on Tom Loring's behalf, and Dora and Alfred had backed her up. Each side proceeded from praise of its own favourite to sneers—by no means covert—at the other's man, and the feud had passed from the stage of words to that of deeds before it was discovered by the superior powers and crushed. On the hosts, of course, the blame had to fall; they were sent to bed, while the guests drove off in triumph, comforted by sweets and shillings. Madge did not think, or pretend to think, that this was justice, and her mother's recital of her crimes to Mrs. Cormack, so far from reducing her to penitence, brought back to her cheeks and eyes the glow they had worn when she slapped (there is no use in blinking facts) Jessie Carlin, and told her that she hated Mr. Ruston. Madge Dennison was like her mother in face and temper. That may have been the reason why Harry Dennison squeezed her hand under the table, and by his tacit aid broke the force of his wife's cold reproofs. But there was perhaps another reason also.