“Oh, but we’ll have another rubber,” said Colin. “Cut in?”
“No, thanks,” said Raymond.
Colin waited till the door had closed behind him. “Lor!” he said.
“Just shut that door, Colin,” said Lord Yardley.
Lady Hester was thrilled about the tobacconist’s young thing; it really would be rather a good joke if one of the boys, following his father’s example, married a “baggage” of that sort, and she determined to pursue the subject with Colin on some future occasion. She loved such loose natural talk as he treated her to; he told her all his escapades. He was just such a scamp as Colin the first must have been, and with just such gifts and utter absence of moral sense was he endowed.
Indeed, the old legend, so it seemed to her, lived again in Colin, though couched in more modern terms. It was the mediæval style to say that for the price of the soul, Satan was willing to dower his beneficiary with all material bounty and graces; more modernly, you said that this boy was an incorrigible young Adonis, who feared neither God nor devil. True, the lordship of Stanier was not yet Colin’s, but something might happen to that grim, graceless Raymond.
How the two hated each other, and how different were the exhibitions of their antagonism! Raymond hated with a glowering, bilious secrecy, that watched and brooded; Colin with a gay contempt, a geniality almost. But if the shrewd old Lady Hester had been asked to wager which of the two was the most dangerous to the other, she would without hesitation have put her money on Colin.
The second rubber was short, but as hilarious as the first, and on its conclusion Lady Hester hurried to bed, saying that she would be “a fright” in the morning if she lost any more sleep. Violet followed her, Philip withdrew to his own room, and Colin sauntered along to the smoking-room in quest of whisky. His Uncle Ronald was still there, rapidly approaching the comatose mood of midnight, which it would have been inequitable to call intoxication and silly to call sobriety. Raymond sprawled in a chair by the window.
“Hullo, Uncle Ronald, still up?” said Colin. “You’ll get scolded.”
Uncle Ronald lifted a sluggish eyelid. “Hey?” he said. “Oh, Colin, is it? What’s the time, my boy?”