Mr. Albert Andrews stood back surveying his hostess with a stare more pop-eyed than usual. He knew pink when he saw it; and he was seeing pink. The silver overdress, however, raised a row of interrogation points across the blank spaces of his mind. Mrs. Bunny had not shown him silver’s place in the emotional scale. He was a cautious, sensitive soul, and desired to avoid making himself ridiculous a second time. He looked about for aid and anon decided that Dr. Wells, whose profession brought him into intimate relations with death, was the man who should know whether a silver overdress was a condition of mourning or not. He drew him aside and asked the important question.
“Silver? Silver? God bless my soul, man, I don’t know. One sees a good deal of it about.”
“I think I recall seeing silver wreaths on caskets?” Mr. Andrews ruminated with questioning inflection.
“No doubt. No doubt. And on wedding cakes, too! Many a man wishes the wreath that topped his wedding cake had adorned his casket instead.” Dr. Wells was not interested in the subject, so he chuckled at his own joke, gave Andrews a dig in the ribs, and made off to the whist table, mentally resolving to have Corinne instead of her mother for his partner. In this he was disappointed. Andrews had already asked Corinne to play with him. He was practising gallantry, as well as colour selection, to fit himself for the rôle he wished to enact as the master of the mistress of Villa Rose.
“I am eager to try the Tschaikowsky with you,” Frei said to Rosamond, taking his violin from its case. “May we not play now?”
“Yes, certainly. We shall not be missed.”
She looked about at her guests and saw that they were all apparently in contentment. Dr. Wells was dealing the cards, and the four at the table were engrossed already with the pleasure to come. Howard and Mabel, chatting in low tones on the verandah, had forgotten all the world but each other. Mrs. Lee was absorbed in a difficult moment of her lace-mending. The Judge had seated himself at the other end of the long settee and descended into the profundities of the latest Digest.
Rosamond, lifting herself on tiptoe, put one finger on her laughing lips and the other hand into Frei’s.
“Come,” she whispered.
Smiling delightedly at her prankishness, he clasped her fingers and tiptoed with her into the music room.