He laughed. "Oh, well," he exclaimed, "you have done me. I haven't touched parallel bars or a trapeze for ten years."
"Neither have I," Guy added.
Thereupon Leonetta allowed Guy to feel the muscles of her arm.
"Iron!" he ejaculated, while Cleopatra looked on with just a little surprise.
"You might at least say steel," she interjected, trying to sustain her rôle as one of the juveniles at table.
In the midst of a very prosy conversation with Sir Joseph and Miss Mallowcoid, Mrs. Delarayne found opportunities enough to watch the younger people, and she was not a little relieved to see the cloud gradually lifting from Leonetta's brow. She knew that in the circumstances she had not been too hard, and gathered from a hundred different signs that her relationship to her younger daughter had been materially improved by what had occurred.
Later on in the drawing-room, before the men arrived, however, Leonetta seemed to suffer a relapse into her former mood of excessive sobriety, and it was then that Miss Mallowcoid beckoned her niece to her.
"I think you were unnecessarily cross with me at dinner," Mrs. Delarayne overheard her sister saying.
Leonetta pouted, and with an air of utter indifference turned to Cleopatra.
"I think Guy Tyrrell rather tame, don't you? It was most awful uphill work talking to him all through dinner."