After this revelation there was a pause that seemed to last for ever. But I suppose it couldn't have been as long as that. For I, turning my eyes from the quartette on the turf, was watching a big white seagull wheeling and swooping above the cliff.
Its long wings had only flapped, slowly, twice, before the hearty voice of Miss Vi Vassity broke the silence that I felt to be quite nerve-racking.
"Well! Are these biographical notes going to keep us busy for the whole afternoon, or are we going to get on to the spirit-kettle and the cakes?
"I'm fair dying for a drop to drink, I can tell you. Talkin' does it. And I never can bear those flasks. Don't trust 'em. Some careless hussy forgets to give 'em a proper clean-out once in a way, and the next time you take your cup o' tea out of the thing where are you? Poisoned and a week in a nursing-home. Miss Vi Vassity, 'London's Love,' has been sufferin' from a severe attack of insideitis, with cruel remarks from Snappy Bits on the subject. Give me hot water out of the kettle.
"Come on, Jim, you shall get it going; you're a handy man with your feet—fingers, I mean; come on, Miss Smith. The other girls seem to have lost themselves somewhere; always do when there's a bit of housework and women's sphere going on, I notice. We'll spread the festive board. Nellie'll bring on the cousin—I can see they've got secrets to talk. S'long!"
She kept up this babble during the whole of tea in the lee of that motor on the downs where Mr. Burke had come upon me as I drowsed after lunch.
The tea was even noisier and gayer than the lunch had been. We had this flow of comment-on-nothing from London's Love, and a couple of songs from our Serio, and American tour reminiscences from our Lady Acrobat. Also a loud and giggling squabble between that lady and the Boy-Impersonator about which of them looked her real age.
Also an exhibition of the blandishments of our Twentieth-Century Hebe, who sat on the turf next to the Honourable Jim. She was doing her utmost to flirt with him; putting her lazy blonde head on one side to cast languishing glances at him, invoking his pity for a midge-bite that she said she had discovered on her upper arm.
"Look," she murmured, holding out the sculptured limb. "Does it show?"
That softly curved, white-skinned, blue-veined and bare arm could have been his to hold for a nearer inspection of that imperceptible wound if he had chosen. I made sure he'd catch hold of it ... it would have been just like him to laugh and suggest kissing it to make it well. I'm sure that's what the "Breathing Statue Girl" meant him to do. They're just a pair of silly flirtatious Bohemians——