"You are tired to death as it is--why should you fuss any more over a pack--"
"Ssh! sir; don't talk rubbish. I am all right; and Eugene is so anxious everything should be a success that I must. Besides I--I like it."
Mrs. Walsall Smith sent the hostess' gathering smile round her long luncheon table, and rose. So did Vincent Dering, who had sat at her right hand--a position due to his rank as commandant of Eshwara--and, as he did, he drew his chair aside to let the girl on his left pass, with his usual somewhat voyant courtesy, though it was only Laila Bonaventura. He had met her several times during the past few days, and the effect which her singing had made on him had vanished before her general failure to interest him in the least. And to-day she actually wore a blue sash! In addition she had filled up the time between her monosyllables in methodically crumbling her bread and ranging the results in a pattern, until the inanity of it had got on his nerves, and he had felt inclined to beg her to desist.
And yet, as in passing her black eyes looked into his with one curious yet comprehensive flash, a memory of the extreme regularity of the curves and lines which had annoyed him, made him--quite irrelevantly--wonder hastily if he could have said anything to Muriel which--
He broke off in his own thought impatiently, and gave an apologetic glance after Mrs. Walsall Smith's fragile figure. There never was anything, never! Never a word said, never a deed done, which all the world--even Eugene Smith himself--might not hear and know. Vincent Dering felt a pulse of sheer virtue as he looked down the long table at his host, with the vague irritation which the possessors of women often arouse in those who are not their possessors. For Muriel Smith's half-playful, half-wistful rejection of sympathy had held that faint hint of dutiful martyrdom which seems so purely angelic to selfish man--unless he happens to be the wretch who inflicts it!
Curious, he thought; Eugene wasn't much of a gentleman, but he wasn't a bad sort, and he was fond of his wife, in a way. Yet he was blind to the fact that Muriel was not fit to go trapesing about his blessed old canal works with the pack of padrés and people he had got together to do honour to his skill. She would do it, of course, and get through with it, too! Here he helped himself to a glass of sherry, and felt incoherently that she was the dearest and best woman in the world,--the one woman in the world, so far as he was concerned.
As he sat between those two empty chairs where those two women, so absolutely unlike, had fenced him in on either side, a faint wonder tinged his virtue in comparing the last three years with the time before it.
If anyone had told him, then, that he would write every day to a woman and expect her to write to him without a word or a deed--
"Please, Dering-darlin'," said an imperious small voice, "mum wants 'oo, 'tos pup'll go off, she says, wis' all a gemplemen, an' she wants 'oo to go off wis' a ladies!"
"All right, little 'un," he laughed gladly, finishing his sherry at a gulp, and, ere catching the little mite in his arms, giving himself that smartening pull together which was so characteristic of the man.