“Lyndhurst, go along with you!” she said, employing an expression, the mental equivalent of which she did not know ever existed in her mind.
“I’ll go along,” he said. “But which is my Cleopatra?”
At the moment, Mrs. Evans approached.
“My two Cleopatras must excuse me,” said this amazing man. “I am engaged for this next dance to the Cleopatra of us all. Ha! Ha!”
He offered his arm to Mrs. Evans, and they went out of the cave of the mulberry-tree again.
The band had not yet struck up for the next dance, the majority of the guests were flocking under the mulberry-tree at the conclusion of the last, and for the moment they had the cool starlit dusk to themselves. And then, all at once, the Major’s sense of boisterous enjoyment deserted him; he felt embarrassed with a secret knowledge that he was expected to say something in tune with this privacy. How that expectation was conveyed he hardly knew; the slight pressure on his arm seemed to announce it unmistakably. It reminded him that he was a man, and yet with all that gaiety and gallantry that were so conspicuous a feature in his behaviour to women in public, he felt awkward and ill at ease. He embarked on a course of desperate and fulsome eulogy, longing in his private soul for the band to begin.
“’Pon my soul, you are an enchantress, Millie!” he said. “You come to our staid, respectable old Riseborough, and before you have been here six months you take us all into fairyland. Positively fairyland. And—and I’ve never seen you looking so lovely as to-night.”
“Let us stroll all round the garden,” she said. “I want you to see it all now it is lit up. And the shrubbery is pretty, too, with—with the filter of starlight coming through the trees. Do tell me truthfully, like a friend, is it going all right? Are they enjoying themselves?”
“Kicking up their heels like two-year-olds,” said Major Ames.
“How wicked of you to say that! But really I had one bad moment, when—when the last Cleopatra came in.”