Zaluski, in the seventh heaven of happiness, was playing with Gertrude Morley, and his play was so good and so graceful that every one was watching it with pleasure. His partner, too, played well; she was a pretty, fair-haired girl, with soft grey eyes like the eyes of a dove; she wore a white tennis dress and a white sailor hat, and at her throat she had fastened a cluster of those beautiful orange-coloured roses known by the prosaic name of ‘William Allan Richardson.’
If Mr. Blackthorne grew angry as he watched Sigismund Zaluski, he grew doubly angry as he watched Gertrude Morley. He said to himself that it was intolerable that such a girl should fall a prey to a vain, shallow, unprincipled foreigner, and in a few minutes he had painted such a dark picture of poor Sigismund that my strength increased tenfold.
“Mr. Blackthorne,” said Mrs. Courtenay, “would you take Mrs. Milton-Cleave to have an ice?”
Now Mrs. Milton-Cleave had always been one of the curate’s great friends. She was a very pleasant, talkative woman of six-and-thirty, and a general favourite. Her popularity was well deserved, for she was always ready to do a kind action, and often went out of her way to help people who had not the slightest claim upon her. There was, however, no repose about Mrs. Milton-Cleave, and an acute observer would have discovered that her universal readiness to help was caused to some extent by her good heart, but in a very large degree by her restless and over-active brain. Her sphere was scarcely large enough for her, she would have made an excellent head of an orphan asylum or manager of some large institution, but her quiet country life offered far too narrow a field for her energy.
“It is really quite a treat to watch Mr. Zaluski’s play,” she remarked as they walked to the refreshment tent at the other end of the lawn. “Certainly foreigners know how to move much better than we do: our best players look awkward beside them.”
“Do you think so?” said Mr. Blackthorne. “I am afraid I am full of prejudice, and consider that no one can equal a true-born Briton.”
“And I quite agree with you in the main,” said Mrs. Milton-Cleave. “Though I confess that it is rather refreshing to have a little variety.”
The curate was silent, but his silence merely covered his absorption in me, and I began to exercise a faint influence through his mind on the mind of his companion. This caused her at length to say:
“I don’t think you quite like Mr. Zaluski. Do you know much about him?”
“I have met him several times this summer,” said the curate, in the tone of one who could have said much more if he would.