The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind of the adjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into the sitting-room and lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was no doubt running skilful fingers through her tumbled hair and daubing her pale lips with red. Ah, how Lansing knew every movement of that familiar rite, even to the pucker of the brow and the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He was seized with a sense of physical sickness as the succession of remembered gestures pressed upon his eyes.... And the other man? The other man, inside the house, was perhaps at that very instant smiling over the remembrance of the same scene!
At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.
XXVII.
Susy and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided from each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with tattered school-books.
In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children from their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any moment Geordie’s imperious cries might summon his slave up to the nursery. In the scant time allotted them, the two sat, and visibly wondered what to say.
Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with its piano laden with tattered music, the children’s toys littering the lame sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled butterflies flanking the cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned to Susy and asked simply: “Why on earth are you here?”
She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood the impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her secret longing to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick had taken definite steps for his release. In dread lest Strefford should have heard of this, and should announce it to her, coupling it with the news of Nick’s projected marriage, and lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should lose her self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she tried to make indifferent: “The ‘proceedings,’ or whatever the lawyers call them, have begun. While they’re going on I like to stay quite by myself.... I don’t know why....”
Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. “Ah,” he murmured; and his lips were twisted into their old mocking smile. “Speaking of proceedings,” he went on carelessly, “what stage have Ellie’s reached, I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully together to-day at Larue’s.”
The blood rushed to Susy’s forehead. She remembered her tragic evening with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and thought to herself. “In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I....”
Aloud she said: “I can’t imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever want to see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all places!”