"I hope you're right, Miss Ocky!"
"Suppose we drop the subject for the time. If you will look in the sitting-room you'll find a book on the table called 'The Court of the Borgias.' Bring it to me, please. I think a little quiet reading will settle my thoughts after our conversation."
He went off smiling to get the volume, and presently returned with it. He lingered to produce a match for the cigarette she took from a stand beside her.
"Thank you for listening to me, Miss Ocky."
"And thank you, Bates, for telling me what you did about father. I am glad he had confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and that he wasn't worrying over me when he had so much else to think about."
"I wish Simon Varr was more like him!" said Bates.
She made no reply to that, and he withdrew in his noiseless fashion. She did not immediately dip into the sedative history of the Borgias, but remained looking at the corner around which he had vanished with something akin to speculative interest. She was pondering the old man's revelation of his hatred for Varr and the curious glint she had caught in his eye at dinner the night before. It would be amusing, she thought, if Bates instead of handing Simon the carving-knife should sometime so far forget himself as to slip it between his master's shoulders.
Amusing was the word she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the East—ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of the queer, drab, cramped and hypocritical Occidental mind.