There was, however, nothing uncomfortable in his eyes. On the contrary, he looked more than ever like the captain, Feo thought, of a County Cricket Club, healthy, confident and fully alive to his enormous responsibility. He wore a suit of thin blue flannels, the M. C. C. tie under a soft low collar, and brown shoes that had become almost red from long and expert treatment. He didn’t shake hands like a German, with a stiff deference contradicted by a mackerel eye, or with the tender effusion of an actor who imagines that women have only to come under his magnetism to offer themselves in sacrifice. Bolt upright, with his head thrown back, he shook hands with an honest grip, without deference and without familiarity, like a good cricketer.
“How do you do, Lady Feo,” he said, in his most masculine voice. “It’s kind of you to see us.” Then he turned to Lola with a friendly smile. “Your telephone message caught me just as I was going to dash off for a game of tennis after a hard day, Madame de Brézé,” he added.
Oh, so this was another of the de Brézé episodes, was it, like the one with Beauty Chalfont. Curiosity came hugely to Feo’s rescue. Here, at any rate, was a break in her run of bad luck, very welcome. What on earth could be the meaning of this quaint meeting,—George Lytham, the earnest worker pledged to reconstruction, and this enigmatic child, who might have stood for Joan of Arc? If Lola had caught Lytham and brought him to Dover Street to receive substantiation, Feo was quite prepared to lie on her behalf. What a joke to palm off the daughter of a Queen’s Road jeweler on the early-Victorian mother of the worthy George!
“Well?” she said, looking from one to the other with a return of her impish delight in human experimentation.
“Mr. Lytham can explain this better than I can,” said Lola quietly.
“I’m not so sure about that, but I’ll do my best.”
He drew a chair forward and sat down. Under ordinary circumstances, where there was the normal amount of happiness, or even the mutual agreement to give and take that goes with the average marriage, his task would have been a difficult one. But in the case of Feo and his chief he felt able to deal with the matter entirely without self-consciousness, or delicacy in the choice of words.
“I needn’t worry you with any of the details of the new political situation, Lady Feo. You know them, probably, as well as I do. But what you don’t know, because the moment isn’t yet ripe for the publication of our plans, is that Mr. Fallaray has been chosen to lead the Anti-waste Party, which is concentrating its forces to rout the old gang out of politics at the next General Election, give Parliament back its lost prestige, and do away with the pernicious influence of the Press Lords. A big job, by Jove, which Fallaray alone can achieve.”
“Well?” repeated Feo, wondering what in the world this preamble had to do with the case in question.
“Well, at the end of the meeting of my party yesterday, I was sent down to Chilton Park to tell Mr. Fallaray our plans. I was stultified to be told that he had decided to chuck politics.”