Stonor took his elbow off the mantel. 'Whatever the reason,' he said airily, 'the result is momentarily inconvenient. Though I am one of those who think it would be easy to overestimate the importance——'
He broke off with an effect of dismissing both the matter and the man. As he turned away, he found himself without the smallest warning face to face with Vida Levering. She had come down the great staircase unobserved and unobserving; her head bent, and she in the act of forcing a recalcitrant hatpin through her hat—doing it under certain disadvantages, as she held her gloves and her veil in one hand.
As she paused there, confronting the tall figure of the new-comer, although it was obvious that her unpreparedness was not less than his own, there was to the most acute eye nothing in the remotest degree dramatic about the encounter—hardly more than a cool surprise, and yet there was that which made Jean say, smiling—
'Oh, you know one another already?'
'Everybody in this part of the world knows Mr. Stonor,' the lady said, 'but he doesn't know me.'
'This is Miss Levering. You knew her father, didn't you?'
Even before Lady John had introduced them, the people in the garden seemed not to be able to support the prospect of Miss Levering's threatened monopoly of the lion. They swarmed in—Hermione Heriot and Paul Filey appearing for the first time since church—they overflowed into the Hall, while Jean Dunbarton, with artless enthusiasm, was demanding of Miss Levering if the reason she knew Mr. Stonor was that she had been hearing him speak.
'Yes,' the lady met his eyes, 'I was visiting some relations near Dutfield. They took me to hear you.'
'Oh—the night the Suffragettes made their customary row——'
'They didn't attack you,' she reminded him.