Neville looked after him.
“I think I can stand about another day of this,” he said, quietly.
“After that you would really not be able to resist the temptation to throw him out of the window, eh? Fie, fie, my dear Neville!” murmured Spenser Churchill, with a smile. “Shall we go and join Lady Grace? She won’t object to a cigarette, I suppose?”
“I don’t know; I never asked her,” he said. “I’ll go and get some cigars,” and he sprang up and left the room.
Spenser Churchill’s bland smile followed him for a moment or two, then the expression of his face wholly changed. His lips seemed to grow rigid, his soft, sleepy eyes acute, his very cheeks, usually so soft and rotund, hard and angular; and he sat with his glass held firmly in his hand, peering thoughtfully at the tablecloth.
Then he rose, and, carefully examining the bottle, poured the remains of it into his glass, and drank it slowly and appreciatively, and then stepped through the open window on to the terrace.
A slim and graceful figure leaned against the balustrade. It was Lady Grace; her hands, clasped together, were pressed hard against the stone coping, as if they were trying to force their way through it, and the face she turned towards him was pale and anxious, the face of one waiting for the verdict; of one expecting the dread fiat of a judge.
With a benign smile, more marked than ever, perhaps intensified by the famous port, he slowly approached her.
“What an exquisite view,” he said, softly, and extending his hands as if he were pronouncing a benediction on the scenery; “now that nature is in her spring-time. How refreshing, how inspiring, how vernal! I cannot express to you, Lady Grace, how deeply this beauteous prospect moves me! One must have a hard and unimpressionable heart, indeed, who is not moved by such a landscape as this; so soft, so—er—green——”
Her clasped hands grew together more tightly.