“How are you, Lord Rye?” he said, holding out his hand. But his eyes were elsewhere. “I don’t think—” he began.
“Oh, you don’t know Mrs. Allbutt, do you?” said Peggy. “Edie, this is Hugh Grainger.”
CHAPTER II
EDITH ALLBUTT went to her room that night feeling that she had passed a very pleasant but slightly astounding evening, and that she did not feel in the least sleepy or at all inclined to go to bed. And the astounding part of the evening, in the main, had been Hugh. All through dinner he and Peggy had fireworked away out of sheer good spirits and a matchless joy of living, and after dinner he had been very insistent on the necessity either of going on the river in a punt or playing ghosts in the garden. His huge high spirits were quite clearly natural to him—all the fireworking was quite obviously the direct result of that, and in no way at all a social duty. These squibs and rockets were as much part of him as his slight, slender frame, his quickness of movement and gesture, his thatch of thick, close-cropped hair, his vivid, handsome face, with its dark eyes and clear white skin. But all dinner-time that was all there was of him: he was just a boy with excellent health and an almost unlimited capacity for enjoying himself; and at the end of dinner she felt that she knew hardly more about him than she had at the beginning. She felt, however, though but dimly, and she was afraid rather ungratefully, for he had been really very entertaining, and it must have been a sour nature, which hers was not, to feel otherwise than exhilarated by the presence of so alert a vitality, that if he was always like that he would become rather fatiguing. Then at once she told herself that she was an old woman, and if she could not be young herself it should be a matter of rejoicing, not of fatigue, that other people could be. But that playing Indians with the children before dinner was a characteristic much more to her mind. That, too, he had not done, she felt, from any direct wish to amuse the children; he had done it because he enjoyed it so much himself. And though the first motive would have been the more altruistic and therefore, she must suppose, the more admirable, she liked the second one best.
Then after dinner had begun the surprises. The boats were locked up. Lord Rye had gone indoors, Peggy refused to play ghosts, and it was clearly impossible for her to play ghosts alone with Hugh. They had strolled, all three of them, up to the veranda outside the drawing-room, and Hugh had caught sight of the new Steinway grand over which Peggy had, as she explained, just ruined herself.
Then Hugh had said:
“I’ll sing to you if you like.”
And Peggy had thanked him almost reverently.
Edith remembered with extreme distinctness what she thought of this. There was something of the coxcomb about it; young men ought not to offer to sing however well they knew their hostess. It was just a little like Stephen Guest, and for that moment she wondered whether the fireworks after all partook, though ever so slightly, of the nature of “showing-off.” But Hugh went in at once, and as she and Peggy sat down in chairs on the veranda close to the open window she had said to her:
“Does he sing well?”