“Well—?”
“Oh, nothing—as yet. Only I ask you ... to go away now.”
“Just as you asked me not to come! Yet you came, because you had the sense to see that if you didn’t ... and I came for the same reason. Look here, my dear, for God’s sake don’t lose your head!”
The challenge seemed to rouse her. She lifted her chin, glanced about the thronged room which they commanded from their corner, and nodded and smiled invitingly at several acquaintances, with the hope that some one of them might come up to her. But though they all returned her greetings with a somewhat elaborate cordiality, not one advanced toward her secluded seat.
She turned her head slightly toward her companion. “I ask you again to go,” she repeated.
“Well, I will then, after the fellow’s sung. But I’m bound to say you’re a good deal pleasanter—”
The first bars of “Salve, Dimora” silenced him, and they sat side by side in the meditative rigidity of fashionable persons listening to expensive music. She had thrown herself into a corner of the sofa, and Henry Prest, about whom everything was discreet but his eyes, sat apart from her, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding his folded opera-hat on his knee, while the other hand rested beside him on the sofa. But an end of her tulle scarf lay in the space between them; and without looking in his direction, without turning her glance from the singer, she was conscious that Prest’s hand had reached and drawn the scarf toward him. She shivered a little, made an involuntary motion as though to gather it about her—and then desisted. As the song ended, he bent toward her slightly, said: “Darling” so low that it seemed no more than a breath on her cheek, and then, rising, bowed, and strolled into the other room.
She sighed faintly, and, settling herself once more in her corner, lifted her brilliant eyes to Sillerton Jackson, who was approaching. “It was good of you to bring Charlie home from the Parretts’ this afternoon.” She held out her hand, making way for him at her side.
“Good of me?” he laughed. “Why, I was glad of the chance of getting him safely home; it was rather naughty of him to be where he was, I suspect.” She fancied a slight pause, as if he waited to see the effect of this, and her lashes beat her cheeks. But already he was going on: “Do you encourage him, with that cough, to run about town after fire-engines?”
She gave back the laugh.