The Helmstones were still discussing whether they should come in. Hermione said it was only a slight sprinkle, and her mother was expecting them back to tea. Lady Barbara, with engaging simplicity, insisted there was no object in going back without Mr. Annan.
I saw at once that Ranny looked different. Just in what way, or to what extent, I could not at first have said. A very little thinner, too little to account for the change I was dimly conscious of. And when he first came in, he came with some nonsense, and that pleasant laugh, that always "started things" in an easy harmonious key.
"We've descended on you," Lord Helmstone said, "like a posse of detectives. Sleuth-hounds on that fella Annan's track. We've our instructions to bag him and carry him home to tea."
Bettina (oh, I could have beaten her for that!) said Mr. Annan would very probably come in presently. And she led the way into the drawing-room, while I took Lord Helmstone upstairs. By the time I came down again Bettina had ordered tea.
Hermione turned round as I came in. "What have you done with my father! Now father's disappeared!"—as if she had only just grasped the fact. "Didn't I tell you," she said to Ranny, "Duncombe is a place where if a man goes in, he doesn't come out?"
Betty and I gave them tea.
I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note in answer to mine.
As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged, too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet, looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turning his way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him, the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring—his laugh most of all gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer.
When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way probably more imbecile than pleasing.
I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to Bettina and to the other, newer, swain—one of the apparently endless supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them.