“D’ye find the colour comes off?” murmured Tommy Whitty, eager for revenge, but too much afraid of Lambert to speak out loud.
Even Francie, though she favoured the repartee with a giggle, was glad that Lambert had not heard.
“D’ye find you want your ears boxed?” she returned in the same tone of voice; “I won’t walk with you if you don’t behave.” Inwardly, however, she decided that Tommy Whitty was turning into an awful cad, and felt that she would have given a good deal to have wiped out some lively passages in her previous acquaintance with him.
At the end of half an hour Mr. Whitty was still with them, irrepressibly intimate and full of reminiscence. Lambert, after determined efforts to talk to Francie, as if unaware of the presence of a third person, had sunk into dangerous silence, and Francie had ceased to see the amusing side of the situation, and was beginning to be exhausted by much walking to and fro. The sun set in smoky crimson behind the town, the sun-set gun banged its official recognition of the fact, followed by the wild, clear notes of a bugle, and a frosty after-glow lit up the sky, and coloured the motionless water of the harbour. A big bell boomed a monotonous summons to afternoon service, and people began to leave the pier. Those who had secured the entrée of the St. George’s Yacht Club proceeded comfortably thither for tea, and Lambert felt that he would have given untold sums for the right to take Francie in under the pillared portico, leaving Tommy Whitty and his seedy black coat in outer darkness. The party was gloomily tending towards the station, when the happy idea occurred to Mr. Lambert of having tea at the Marine Hotel; it might not have the distinction of the club, but it would at all events give him the power of shaking off that damned presuming counter-jumper, as in his own mind he furiously designated Mr. Whitty.
“I’m going to take you up to the hotel for tea, Francie,” he said decisively, and turned at once towards the gate of the Marine gardens. “Good evening, Whitty.”
The look that accompanied this valedictory remark was so conclusive that the discarded Tommy could do no more than accept the position. Francie would not come to his help, being indeed thankful to get rid of him, and he could only stand and look after the two figures, and detest Mr. Lambert with every fibre of his little heart. The coffee-room at the hotel was warm and quiet, and Francie sank thankfully into an armchair by the fire.
“I declare this is the nicest thing I’ve done to-day,” she said, with a sigh of tired ease; “I was dead sick of walking up and down that old pier.”
This piece of truckling was almost too flagrant, and Lambert would not even look at her as he answered,
“I thought you seemed to be enjoying yourself, or I’d have come away sooner.”
Francie felt none of the amusement that she would once have derived from seeing Mr. Lambert in a bad temper; he had stepped into the foreground of her life and was becoming a large and serious object there, too important and powerful to be teased with any degree of pertinacity.