"Another parable! How biblical you are becoming!" said Lady Jim, desperately weary and with her eye on the clock. "I do not understand, nor do you, my poor boy."
"I understand that you have made a fool of me," he snapped brusquely.
"Oh no! Nature has been beforehand there," she retorted, beginning to lose her temper with a man who would explain. "Don't be silly, Harry! Go home, and think of our future."
"Our future!" He leaped to his feet with a shining face.
Leah regretted the misused pronoun, and began to anticipate renewed melodrama. But her little tin god, pitying a votary whose nerves were jangled by stupid honesty, sent a seasonable visitor.
"His Grace the Duke of Pentland," announced a grandiloquent footman, flinging wide the door.
"Don't look so disgusted!" Leah flung an angry whisper in Askew's lowering face as she sailed forward to meet her father-in-law. "How are you, Duke? This is a surprise--a delightful one, of course. I never expected so pleasant a visitor."
The room was tolerably dim, and the Duke had not the keen sight of his youth. "Mr.--Mr.----!" hesitated His Grace.
"Mr. Askew," chimed in Lady Jim, glad that the mask of twilight was on the younger man's very cross face. "He's just going. You know Mr. Askew, of course, Duke. I met him at Firmingham. Must you really go, Mr. Askew? So sorry! We may meet at Lady Quain's to-night--I look in there for half an hour. Good-bye for the present. So kind of you to see me home from Ranelagh! Very dull, wasn't it?" and, rattling on to drown any too tender word he might let slip, she hustled him to the door.
"Our future!" breathed the inconvenient third, opening the gate of paradise most reluctantly.