As for Professor Lomax, Jimmy’s father, no one had ever seen him other than in high spirits. The author—after a lifetime of profound and exact scientific research that had earned him a world-wide reputation—of an enquiry into the possible survival of human personality, which was the controversial topic of that winter and which threatened to deprive him of that reputation, he was in striking contrast with the idea of him propagated by the sensational Press. There was nothing of the visionary about those clear-cut features. A stranger would have diagnosed him as a lawyer—a lawyer whose judicial perception of evidence was clarified by a sense of humour. The mobile mouth, even in silence, hinted at this latter quality. The eyes twinkled, eminently sane, under a well-balanced brow. He joked like a schoolboy with his host’s daughter, exciting—for the secretly selfish pleasure of hearing it—her gay young laugh. Occasionally he glanced across to his son, approbation in his eyes.
Hetty Forsdyke, the only woman of the party, was a typical specimen of self-reliant, college-bred American girl. Good to look upon, her beauty hinted at a race which had been proud of its exclusiveness long after Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the States. Her vivacity and charm had roots, perhaps, in the same stock, but the cool, level-headed understanding of life, which she expressed in a slang that provoked her father to vain rebuke, and the genuineness of which was vouched for by her clear gray eyes, was an attribute of the Forsdykes and the North.
The dinner was nearly at an end. Forsdyke, launched on a story of a Presidential campaign in the Middle West a generation ago, had arrived at the stage where the chuckles of his hearers were on the point of culminating in the final burst of laughter. Hetty, her glass between her fingers, half-way to her mouth, was looking at him with a smile that pretended the story was quite new to her. Suddenly her expression changed. She stared, as if spell-bound, at the dark curtains from which her father’s oval face detached itself in the illumination of the table. The glass slipped from her fingers, smashed.
Forsdyke’s story ceased abruptly. Four pairs of alarmed eyes focussed themselves upon his daughter. Jimmy, involuntarily, had half risen from his chair. The movement seemed to recall the girl to her surroundings. She shuddered and then, with an evident effort of will, brought back her gaze to the table. Her smile routed the momentary anxiety of her companions.
“How careless of me!” she said easily, quelling, with quiet self-control, her confusion ere it could well be remarked. “I don’t know what I was thinking of!—Do go on, Poppa! It was just getting interesting.”
She signed composedly to a servant to pick up the broken glass, and settled herself, all attention, to the familiar story.
“What a hostess she is!” thought her father. “Just like——” He did not finish the complementary clause and stifled another which began: “I wonder what I shall do when——” He picked up his story again and was rewarded by his meed of laughter. But his eyes rested uneasily on his daughter and he promised himself a later enquiry into this abnormality.
The party withdrew into the drawing-room, where, since Forsdyke was a widower of many years’ masculine supremacy, the men lit their cigars. Hetty, at a request from her father, seated herself at the grand piano in the far corner, and commenced the soft chords of a Chopin prelude. Jimmy Lomax stood over her. There was already something proprietary in his air. But the girl, after one glance up at him, seemed to forget his presence in the spell of the music. Her position commanded a full view of the room and she looked dreamily across to where the three men were gathered by the white marble fireplace.
Suddenly the music stopped on a crashing discord. The girl had jumped to her feet, was trembling violently. Young Lomax clutched at her.