Hugh had given a slight groan at Ambrose’s allusion to the moral effects of his singing, but even if heard, it was at once forgotten in the boy’s cries of joy who ran galloping round the table with very high action of his small knickerbockered legs to kiss his father, while Agnes, having told Mrs. Owen in good, firm French, so that Ambrose should not understand, the story of the little boy who gave the old woman the strawberries, rose to go.
“You mustn’t sit long over your cigarettes, Dick,” she said, “or we shall never get through with all we are going to do.”
“No, we won’t be long,” he said; “there’s a heavy programme in front of us, eh, Mrs. Owen?”
“I’m sure your part of it won’t be heavy,” she said.
Dick passed the port to Hugh when the ladies had left the room with Ambrose prancing on ahead.
“A very charming, cultivated woman,” he said. “She knows Venice as I know my parish. And I would be far from asserting off-hand that there was not something to be said of her view of ‘Gambits.’ It was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me. You found a valuable ally there, eh, Hugh?”
Hugh poured out a glass of port, lit a cigarette, and then drank off the port merely with the air of a thirsty man, neither tasting it nor thinking about it. That sort of thing always rather annoyed the Canon, who paid high prices for sound wine, though he did not take it himself.
“Oh, I don’t know that one wants allies if one is quite convinced of a thing,” he said. “In matters of conviction you are perfectly content to stand alone, if nobody agrees with you.”
Hugh always spoke very quickly, but in the speed of this his brother-in-law thought he detected the note of impatience.
“You rather imply that you would sooner Mrs. Owen didn’t agree with you,” he said.