“Good lord!” he ejaculated. “The girl doesn’t know... How should she? Didn’t I tell you that I fell in love with a face?—Its owner was a stranger to me. I intended to effect an introduction; but some fellow got ahead of me, and carried her off.”
“Oh!” said Mrs Carruthers, manifestly relieved.
“A stranger! Then she doesn’t count. You have simply been wearying me with your nonsense.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were genuinely interested. When you are bored you shouldn’t appear so eager for details. In a desire to be obliging one is apt to become prosy.”
Carruthers entered the room at the moment with a syphon of soda and glasses. Dare eyed the syphon discontentedly.
“I hope you are for offering me something more heartening than that,” he remarked. “Your wife has reduced me to a state bordering on nervous collapse. She is starting a matrimonial agency. I wish you would bear me out in the lie that I’ve got a wife somewhere. I fancy she thinks it is not respectable to be unmarried.”
“The whisky is on the table behind you,” returned Carruthers, unmoved. “As for bearing you out in the lie, how do I know it is one? It isn’t to be credited that every man who poses as a bachelor is single.”
“If you are going to talk in that strain,” Mrs Carruthers observed, “I’m going to bed. It is past two.”
She paused beside her husband, and pointed at Dare with a gesture that conveyed a mixture of derision and tolerant amusement and a certain affectionate malice.
“He has been treating me to a resuscitation of his dead and gone love affairs,” she explained, “because I am desirous of interesting him in Blanche Maitland.”