“Were you surprised to see me with your father?” he asked, a little inanely.
“I cannot conceive what you two have found in common,” she admitted.
“Perhaps our interest in you,” he replied. “By-the-bye, I have just seen him perform a quixotic but a very fine action,” Francis said. “He stopped a carter from thrashing his horse; knocked him down, bought the horse from him and sent it home.”
She was mildly interested.
“An amiable side of my father's character which no one would suspect,” she remarked. “The entire park of his country house at Hatch End is given over to broken-down animals.”
“I am one of those,” he confessed, “who find this trait amazing.”
“And I am another,” she remarked coolly. “If any one settled down seriously to try and understand my father, he would need the spectacles of a De Quincey, the outlook of a Voltaire, and the callousness of a Borgia. You see, he doesn't lend himself to any of the recognised standards.”
“Neither do you,” he said boldly.
She looked away from him across the House, to where Sir Timothy was talking to a man and woman in one of the ground-floor boxes. Francis recognised them with some surprise—an agricultural Duke and his daughter, Lady Cynthia Milton, one of the most, beautiful and famous young women in London.
“Your father goes far afield for his friends,” Francis remarked.