“What on earth can have brought him?—oh, he takes one’s breath away,” whispered Lady Innisfail to Harold, with a pretty fair imitation of a smile lingering about some parts of her face.
Harold shook his head. There was not even the imitation of a smile about his face.
Lady Innisfail gave a laugh, and turned quickly to Miss Avon.
“My husband will be delighted to meet you, my dear,” said she. “He is certain to know your father.”
Harold watched Lord Innisfail shaking hands with Miss Avon at the side of the billiard table, while his father bent down to make another stroke. When the stroke was played he saw his father straighten himself and look toward Miss Avon.
The look was a long one and an interested one. Then the girl disappeared with Lady Innisfail, and the look that Lord Fotheringay cast at his son was a short one, but it was quite as intelligible to that soft as the long look at Miss Avon had been to him.
Harold went slowly and in a singularly contemplative mood to his bedroom, whence he emerged in a space, wearing a smoking-jacket and carrying a pipe and tobacco pouch.
The smoking-jackets that glowed through the hall towards the last hour of the day at Castle Innisfail were a dream of beauty.
Lady Innisfail had given orders to have a variety of sandwiches and other delicacies brought to the hall for those of her guests who had attended the festivities at Ballycruiskeen; and when Harold found his way downstairs, he perceived in a moment that only a few of the feeble ones of the house-party—the fishermen who had touches of rheumatism and the young women who cherished their complexions—were absent from the hall.
He also noticed that his father was seated by the side of Beatrice Avon and that he was succeeding in making himself interesting to her.