‘Yes?’ says Crosby.
‘He’s perfectly ridiculous. He is here morning, noon and night. And when she lets him, he sits in her pocket by the hour. Of course it bores her, but Susan is so absurdly good-natured that she puts up with everything. Come down and have a game of tennis. Do!’
Betty, who is bon camarade with Crosby, slips her hand into his arm and leads him tennis-wards.
So this is James. Crosby gives direct attention to the young man on the tennis-ground below him. A young man got up in irreproachable flannels, and with a sufficiently well-bred air about him. Crosby gives him all his good points without stint. He is well got up, and well groomed, and decently shaved—and confoundedly ugly. He laughs as he tells himself this. There is solace in the thought. In fact, James McIlveagh with his big nose and little eyes, and the rather heavy jaw, and the general look of doggedness about him, could hardly be considered a beauty except by a deluded mother.
He is playing a set with Carew against Dom and Jacky, who is by no means to be despised as a server. It occurs to Crosby, watching him, that he is playing rather wildly, and giving more attention to the hall-door in the distance than to his adversary. Game and set are called for Dom and Jacky. It is with an open sense of joy upon his ugly face that Mr. McIlveagh flings down his racket and balls; and indeed presently, when he goes straight towards——
Towards whom?
Crosby, curious, follows the young man’s going, and then sees Susan.
Susan, with Bonnie! A Bonnie who now trots happily beside her, and is evidently quite her slave—a pretty undoing of the old days, when she was always his. Tommy, full of toys brought by Crosby—a white rabbit, a performing elephant, an awful bear, and various other delightful things tucked under his fat arms—is following them.
And now McIlveagh has reached her. He is speaking to her. Crosby, with a grim sense of amusement at his own frame of mind, wonders what on earth that idiot can be saying.
Presently Susan, smiling sweetly, and shaking her head as if giving a very soft refusal to some proposal on the part of James, comes this way. Tommy has caught hold of Bonnie’s hand—the new Bonnie, who can now run about with him—and is dragging him towards the little wood, and Susan is protesting. But now Bonnie is protesting too. ‘I can go, Susan. I have walked a great deal farther than that. I have really.’ Crosby, watching still, as if infatuated, can see that Susan is studying Bonnie silently, as if in great amazement.