What was his offence, he asked himself, as his brougham glided along the Embankment. Simply this: there had been a claim presented for his mine, which was, without doubt, a fraud, which few people would ever have believed in, and which, in a court of law, would have stood but little chance of success. What a fool he had been not to defy Sinclair, to go to his directors and tell them the truth, to resist stoutly any claim the man might bring! Since his first compromise with Rowan, everything had gone wrong. It was unworthy for a man in his position to have allowed Rowan even to play the ambassador, apart from anything else. He saw very clearly in those few minutes where the mistake of his life had been. What he could not see was whither he was tending.
Winifred was waiting for him in the hall of the small hotel in Dover Street. For three days, at her own request, he had not seen her. Nothing, however, had prepared him for the transformation which he now saw. She was faultlessly dressed in a gown of the latest design, and a picture hat which even he recognized as being something quite apart from the usual efforts of even the Bond Street shopkeepers. In every detail she seemed to express the wholly self-satisfied, half-insolent perfection of the woman who knows that she may and does command the best of everything. And with this change in her dress seemed to have come a similar change in her deportment. Her aloofness was still evident enough, but she carried herself with confidence, and with a sort of languid, graceful ease.
"You are nearly ten minutes late," she said quietly. "Where are you taking me to lunch?"
"Wherever you like," he answered. "What about Prince's?"
She took a gold purse and a tiny black spaniel from the neatly dressed maid who stood by her side, and lifting her skirts in her other hand, passed through the door which he was holding open. The lace of her petticoat, the slenderness of her arched instep, the delicate narrowness of her patent shoes, were revelations to him. He gave an order to his chauffeur, and sat down by her side.
"You appear," he said, "to possess a gift for assimilation!"
"My sex is like that," she said. "I have had a good many years to wait, to store up knowledge in. Besides," she continued, a little mockingly, "you yourself are supposed to be something exceptional in the way of grooming, aren't you? There is no need for other people to find our engagement surprising."
Looking at her critically, "I think," he said, "that there is no fear of that."
"You flatter me," she murmured.
"Not at all," he answered. "People might wonder, perhaps, how it is possible to fall in love with anyone whose expression so much resembles that of those statues in there," pointing to a gallery which they were passing. "You have no other fault. There is none, at least, to be found in your appearance. You certainly do look, however, a little inclined to be faultily faultless."