"Offended me!" cried Christina, with widening eyes and a puzzled look. "When have you seen me to offend me! I haven't seen you since your garden party, and you certainly didn't offend me then—you were awfully nice to us all!"
"Ah, that wasn't seeing you," Lord Manister murmured. "I don't reckon that I've seen you since—the photographs. I had to go to Scotland; I meant to tell you."
"It wouldn't have interested me," said Christina, with a shrug. "It might have interested me if you had said—you were not going," she added next moment. Her tone had dropped. She looked at him and smiled.
Her smile stayed with him after she was gone; but from his face you would not have guessed that he was nursing a kind look. She had given him one smile, which made up for many things. But you would have thought, with his people, that he had been suffering the whole evening from acute boredom: you might well have fancied, with Lady Mary, that a remark disparaging Australian women would have met with a grateful response from him. The response it did meet with was anything but grateful to Lady Mary Dromard. It drove her from the room, in which Manister and his mother were presently left alone.
"I think you were just," the countess said critically. "They are pleasant people, and quite all right. The young man is their weak point."
"They always are," her son remarked, rather savagely still. "They're larrikins!"
"The young girl was especially nice, and sang like a lady."
"Ah, you approve of her," said Lord Manister dryly.
"Entirely, I think. Evidently you don't. I only saw you speak to her once, toward the end. Yet she has met you in Australia; I should have recognized that, I think. Now her people," Lady Dromard added tentatively, "will be rather superior, I suppose, as colonials go?"
"Well, they're rich; I suppose that's how colonials go."