In the brave March sunlight which shafted down on her, her head looked more like a Botticelli angel's than ever. The raw gold of her bobbed hair shone solid as metal, making a sharp edge where it ended against the ivory pallor of her throat. She was dressed in a white tailor-made serge. Her violet eyes danced with eager secrets.
"What are you doing to-day?" she whispered.
"Nothing!" he whispered, "if you want me."
"Then invite me out to lunch. I've such heaps to tell you. Don't let Daddy take you to his club—I know he's going to ask you. And, oh, before I forget, I've told them nothing about yesterday, so don't give me away by accident." Then in a sly aside, just as she was turning the door-knob to admit him to her father's library, "You've been getting on famously with Maisie, haven't you?"
Before he could reply, they were across the threshold. There was a sound as of a rheumaticky hen stirring in its nest. The neck of Sir Tobias craned painfully round the corner of a high-backed chair.
"Here's Lord Taborley to see you, Daddy. Don't keep him forever. He's just invited me to go out with him to lunch."
Having shot her bolt, with the masterly strategy of her sex, she vanished, pulling the door behind her.
What would Shakespeare have said under the circumstances, and what would a suitor have said to Shakespeare when he knew that he was suspected of having gone back on his request for the daugh
ter's hand in marriage? Tabs almost felt that he was in the actual presence of the bard of Stratford, Sir Tobias looked so ineffectually pompous and overweighted with gravity. Both Sir Tobias and Shakespeare, in the opinion of Tabs, were vastly overrated persons; but the only thing Shakespearian about Sir Tobias this morning was the magnificent calmness of his forehead; his podgy body, supported by its stiff little pen-wiper legs was more reminiscent of Punch, as portrayed on the cover of the famous weekly which bears his name.