However, Ivor’s next words gave me some inkling of what I wished to know. “It’s importance evidently doesn’t consist in bulk,” he said lightly. “I can easily carry the case in my breast pocket.”
“Pray put it there at once, and guard it as you would guard the life and honour of a woman,” said the Foreign Secretary solemnly. “Now, I, must go and look for my wife. It’s better that you and I shouldn’t be seen together. One never knows who may have got in among the guests at a crush like this. I will go out at one door, and when you’ve waited for a few minutes, you can go, by way of another.”
A moment later there was silence in the room, and I knew that Ivor was alone. What if I spoke, and startled him? All that is impish in me longed to see how his face would look; but there was too much at stake. Not only would I hate to have him scorn me for an eavesdropper, but I had already built up a great plan for the use I could make of what I had overheard.
CHAPTER III
LISA MAKES MISCHIEF
When Ivor was safely out of the room, my first thought was to escape from behind the lounge, and get upstairs to my own quarters. But just as I had sat up, very cramped and wretched, with one foot and one arm asleep, Lord Mountstuart came in again, and down I had to duck.
He had brought a friend, who was as mad about old books and first editions, as he; a stuffy, elderly thing, who had never seen Lord Mountstuart’s treasures before. As both were perfectly daft on the subject, they must have kept me lying there an hour, while they fussed about from one glass-protected book-case to another, murmuring admiration of Caxtons, or discussing the value of a Mazarin Bible, with their noses in a lot of old volumes which ought to have been eaten up by moths long ago. As for me, I should have been delighted to set fire to the whole lot.
At last Lord Mountstuart (whom I’ve nicknamed “Stewey”) remembered that there was a ball going on, and that he was the host. So he and the other duffer pottered away, leaving the coast clear and the door wide open. It was just my luck (which is always bad and always has been) that a pair of flirting idiots, for whom the conservatory, or our “den,” or the stairs, wasn’t secluded enough, must needs be prying about and spy that open door before I had conquered my cramps and got up from behind the sofa.
The dim light commended itself to their silliness, and after hesitating a minute, the girl—whoever she was—allowed herself to be drawn into a room where she had no business to be. Then, to make bad worse, they selected the lounge to sit upon, and I had to lie closely wedged against the wall, with “pins and needles” pricking all over my cramped body, while some man I didn’t know proposed and was accepted by some girl I shall probably never see.
They continued to sit, making a tremendous fuss about each other, until voices were “heard off,” as they say in the directions for theatricals, whereupon they sprang up and hurried out like “guilty things upon a fearful summons.”
By that time I was more dead than alive, but I did manage to crawl out of my prison, and creep up to my room by a back stairway which the servants use. But it was very late now, and people were going, even the young ones who love dancing. As soon as I was able, I scuttled out of my ball dress and into a dressing gown. Also I undid my hair, which is my one beauty, and let it hang over my shoulders, streaming down in front on each side, so that nobody would know one shoulder is higher than the other. It wasn’t that I was particularly anxious to appear well before Di (though I have enough vanity not to like the contrast between us to seem too great, even when she and I are alone), but because I wanted her to think, when she came to my room, that I’d been there a long time.