A stillness as of death fell on the party, and the excited breathing of all present could be heard.
"I thought I knew you," Denis exclaimed at last, recovering from the unpleasant shock the announcement had given him. "But I couldn't for the life of me think who you could be."
"Do they know you are here?" Leonetta gasped.
"I presume so," said Lord Henry, "my luggage was taken up about an hour ago."
He rose, and immediately the rest of the party did likewise. Out on the bank of the Sprigg, in the moonlight, Denis then proceeded to introduce all those present, and the whole gathering slowly crossed the bridge and moved towards the house.
Lord Henry, with Denis on his left and Leonetta on his right, was in the van, but the others clustered round as closely as they could, and conversation was general.
Women of whatever station in life and from whatever clime, have a very acute sense of strength and power in the opposite sex. If modern society has dispensed with the arena and with the tilting jousts of chivalry, it has nevertheless not deadened either women's passion for the tournament, or the keenness with which they divine the merits of their respective knights. And if argument is the only remaining form in which that clash of arms of olden times is witnessed by them to-day, it is with no diminished interest or perspicuity that they register its results. Ordinary games hardly meet all the demands of the true joust; for, in the first place, they do not include to the same extent as argument, that formidable element in modern knightly equipment, the intellect; and, secondly, because to the most thick-skinned there is something so much more mortifying, ignominious, and humiliating in being beaten in argument than in losing a game, that argument still retains, though in an attenuated and spiritualised form, something of the excitement and gravity of armed conflict.
Denis Malster was well aware of all this,—indeed had he not thrown down his gauntlet every night to the Incandescent Gerald precisely because he knew how well he himself looked in the lists, and how well he tilted? But perhaps Lord Henry was even better aware than Denis of the important part played by intellectual male conflict in the presence of women; and he moreover realised more certainly than Denis could possibly have guessed, the precise effect on the female mind of repeated victories in this modern and polite form of tournament.
Certainly as Leonetta, Vanessa, Agatha, and Mrs. Tribe hastened their footsteps to catch every word that fell from Lord Henry's lips, they were largely animated by the natural curiosity provoked by the presence of a distinguished stranger; but in their eagerness to get close up to him and to be in constant earshot of his voice, there was also the tacit admission, possibly unrealised by any of them as yet, that in him they had recognised a knight of peculiar power and of brilliant style.
They had not concerned themselves with the merits of the actual point that had been at issue. All they felt was that a certain speaker had spoken, not as one of the scribes, but as one having authority, and that the former champion of the lists had for once been worsted in their presence.