Captain Ross had planted himself just where she had expected that he might; he was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the log fire.
That hearthrug was wide and white and fluffy; there was a brass-edged glass screen before the fender. The mantelpiece was of white alabaster and hung with looped drapery of peacock-blue brocade, lustrous and pompous and ball-fringed, dating from 1889. Upon the mantelshelf itself there stood under a tall glass shade an ormolu clock, with figures of nymphs and Cupid. On each side of this gleamed candlesticks with dangling prisms.
There were also china ornaments, a miniature of Margaret Howel-Jones at eighteen and another glass shade protecting a branch of white coral; the whole reflected in a gilt-framed mirror.
Everything in that drawing-room was in key with that mantelpiece. And into that complete and Victorian harmony there broke the Neo-Georgian note of a girl wearing the little modern serge frock, the pert effective shoes, and the hair-dressing of the instant.
But Captain Ross, turning abruptly did not see the dramatic contradiction of that girl to this room.
What he saw was the girl at last in the background that suited her. Yes; here she was, where she should be. None of your gimcrack hotels or grimy offices or fly-blown, cotton-glove restaurants! A girl like that ought never to leave a place like this. The place into which any decent man instinctively wants to put the sweetest woman he knows——A Nice, Comfortable Home of her Own.
(That the woman invariably longs to be "put" there has never yet been questioned by this type.)
To him every detail of the place seemed in league to "set" her; sweetly, worthily. For the first time he saw her as in a shrine—therefore to be worshipped, yes! worshipped.
But there was nothing of this to be read in Captain Ross's face as he returned her soft-voiced, surprised-sounding greeting. He was positively scowling.
And why was the finest judge of women in Europe scowling like this?