Then Joyselle turned to her, his face so eloquent that she felt like warning him not to betray his secret. "I—I am so happy to be here," he stammered.
Her very black, very well-drawn eyebrows drew a trifle closer together, and with the quickness of his race he saw it.
"Forgive me, Lady Brigit," he said hastily in English. "I am sorry. And—I will not say it again! Only——"
"Only—you are glad? Well, I'm glad, too," she answered slowly. The noisier the others grew as dinner progressed, the closer she and this quiet-voiced boy seemed to draw together.
"Poor old Ponty, too bad he couldn't come," cried Mr. Newlyn, pecking, sparrow-like, at a scrap of food on his plate. "Anything wrong, Lady Kingsmead?"
"No, I don't think so. He telephoned just before dinner—oh!"
She broke off, and everyone turned towards the door as it opened noisily to admit a stout, red-faced man, who stood hesitating on the threshold, not as much apparently from shyness as from a kind of bodily stammer of movement.
"Ponty!"
"Awfully sorry, Tony," explained Lord Pontefract, advancing towards his hostess, "awfully sorry, but that idiot Hendricks got a telephone message wrong, and I thought I couldn't come. So when I found out, I thought 'better late than never,' though I had dined. Please say 'better late than never.'"
"Better late than never," chanted the whole party dissonantly, and room was made for the new-comer between Brigit and Yelverton.