“You are bound to forgive him; I forgave that old lady for you the other day—you owe me a free pardon for Geoffrey.”
“Oh, but that was different. She—she——”
“She did not want to kiss him, did she?” put in Geoffrey the irrepressible. “He never would have forgiven that, be sure!”
When the ladies had gone to bed, Reginald took a turn up and down the terrace, solus: “I cannot make her out,” he said to himself as he knocked the ashes off his cheroot. “At times, such as this evening for instance, I could almost imagine that the past was a bad dream, nothing more. It’s a curious thing that my own wife is the only woman who has ever puzzled me. One day she says we are to be strangers, the next friends; one day a cool shake hands, another a kiss. We spent an hour in a fool’s paradise to-night—at any rate I did. I would be an idiot indeed if I took it for the real thing I seemed so sure of once—paradise without the fool.”
CHAPTER IV.
BAD NEWS.
The next day was Sunday, and all the party went to church together in the open carriage. Alice, in a lovely white bonnet, a mass of ostrich feathers, sat opposite to Geoffrey, who, after carefully inspecting her, patronisingly remarked:
“That is a most touching construction on your head, Alice, and not unbecoming. Have yourself painted for the next Academy, ‘Lady in a Bonnet.’”
“How ridiculous! Fancy me in the Royal Academy!”
“Why not? Are you above it, like the old lady who said ‘she would not mind being painted for the Academy, but would wait till she went to Rome and have herself done by one of the old masters.’”
“I believe you spend your time making up these stories, Geoffrey. Here we are—now hand me down nicely; don’t haul me out as you generally do.”