“Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
“Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a visitor?” he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
“Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
“Flamel? Again?”
She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over here.”
Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him next Sunday.”
Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do you want to?”
“Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
“Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her tea, she returned the feminine answer—“I thought you did.”
“I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would be rather jolly; let’s go.”