“No, Uncle Ford.”
“Ah, well, of course that’s very fortunate for us. We shall have the benefit of your society all the time, I take it.”
“You must come and stay with us, Cecil, for a bit,” said Diana kindly. “I daresay Grandmama will be able to spare you.”
“Ah, but can Cecil bear to leave home?” Ford pretended to deliberate. “But no doubt a public-school boy can do these things; they’re a strange race, public-school boys. Have you found that, Cecil?”
The boy stared at his uncle with absolutely lustreless eyes and made no answer. Ford emitted a very slight laugh.
There was an odd sense of isolation for Lucian in finding himself thus alone to estimate the strange, hidden value of their surface intercourse. Rose, as he well knew, had no inner metre for the gauging of complexities. More and more, she reminded him of some magnificent dumb animal, quick to sense enmity, turning this way and that, unable to escape the goad, and incapable of retaliation in kind, but with inarticulate, pent-up forces gathering for some long-deferred onrush that might yet send down all before it.
She spoke now from the other side of the table. “What are you laughing at, Ford?”
The aggression in her manner was quite unmistakeable, and Lucian saw Diana open astonished eyes, and Sir Thomas draw his heavy brows more closely together.
The least flicker passed across Cecil’s young face, with its new, strangely shuttered look, and without turning his head he shot a glance at his mother from the corners of his eyes.
“What are you laughing at, Ford?” said Rose contemptuously.