A flicker of a smile passed over a profile heavy-browed, handsome, and disdainful. "He's an ugly little monster so far." She had a way of stringing out her sentences as after-thoughts. "I daresay he's all right."
There followed a pause so long and deep that in it you could hear the ticking of the clock. He was determined to be as apathetic as herself. She had no air of thinking. She scarcely so much as moved. Her stillness suggested the torrid, brooding calm before volcanic or seismic convulsion. Without a turning of the head or a change in her languid intonation, she said, casually:
"You're our lost brother, aren't you?"
The emotion from which she was so free almost strangled him. He could barely breathe the words, "Would you care if I were?"
"What would be the use of my caring if papa was satisfied?"
"Still, I should think, that one way or the other, you might care."
To this challenge she made no response. She was not hostile in any active sense; he was sure of that. She impressed him rather as exhausted after terrific scenes of passion, waywardness, and disillusion. A little rest, and she would be ready for the same again, with himself perhaps to take the consequence.
Mrs. Whitelaw came in with the rapid step and breathless, syncopated utterance he remembered.
"So sorry to be late. I'd been for a long drive. I wanted to think. I had no idea what time it was. I suppose you must be hungry."