"May I sit down here, Brigit?"
She turned at his voice, and then stared at him. "You look very ill," she said abruptly, "is your heart all right?"
Her face did not change as she spoke, and there was no friendliness in her tone, but he thanked God that he was, and looked, ill.
"My heart is weak, I believe; nothing organic. It is very warm, and I never can bear heat. You look tired yourself."
She nodded absently. "Yes, I have been away—at the Bertie Monson's. Nelly Monson always gives me a headache, she talks so loud. And my room was under the nursery. I do hate children."
Carron caught his breath. She was actually talking civilly to him. And, then, remembering his request to her mother, he, for a second, hated Lady Kingsmead with a bitter and senseless hatred. Was Brigit, after all, only talking to him as a favour to her mother? But a second's reflection showed him the folly of this idea. Had Brigit ever done anything to please her mother? Never.
One of the two women-guests sat down at the piano and began to play, very softly, an old song of Tosti's. Everybody listened. A hansom jingled by and a bicycle's sharp bell was a loud noise in the after-dinner silence.
Joyselle was standing by a table, absently balancing on his forefinger a long, broad, ivory paper-knife. He was, Brigit remembered, curiously adept in balancing, and once she had seen him go through, for Tommy's amusement, a whole series of the kind, from the classic broomstick on his chin, to blowing three feathers about the room at a time, allowing none of them to fall. How quickly he had moved, in spite of his great height, and how Tommy had laughed. But, for the past week, something had gone wrong with the violinist. He had been away from the house one day when she went, and that afternoon, when she "dropped in" on her way from the station, he had hardly spoken. In his silence he seemed immeasurably far from her, and she would have given worlds to read his thoughts.
During dinner he had been conventionally polite, but playing a rôle was so foreign to him that even this laudable one of pretending to be amused when he was bored sat gloomily and guiltily on him.
Carron sat by her for twenty minutes, but her eyes were fixed on Joyselle, and her whole mind groping in the darkness for his.