CHAPTER XXVI
AN UNEXPECTED GUEST
Lord Littimer returned, as he declared, with the spirits and appetite of a schoolboy. All the same, he did not for one moment abandon his usual critical analysis. He rattled on gaily, but he was studying his guest all the same. She might have been the typical American lady student; but he was not blind to the fact that the plain muslin and lace frock she wore was made in Paris or that her manners and style must have been picked up in the best society. She sat there under the shaded lights and behind the bank of flowers like as to the manner born, and her accent was only sufficiently American to render her conversation piquant.
"You have always been used to this class of life?" Littimer asked.
"There you are quite mistaken," Christabel said, coolly. "For the last few years my existence has been anything but a bed of roses. And your remark, my lord, savours slightly of impertinent curiosity. I might as well ask you why your family is not here."
"We agree to differ," Littimer responded. "I recollect it caused me a great deal of annoyance at the time. And my son chose to take his mother's part. You knew I had a son?"
"Yes," said Christabel, without looking up from the peach she was peeling. "I have met him."
"Indeed. And what opinion did you form of my son, may I ask?"
"Well, I rather liked him. He seemed to me to be suffering from some great trouble, and trouble I am sure that was not of his own creating."
"Which means to say you feel rather sorry for Frank. But when you say the trouble was not of his own creating you are entirely mistaken. It is not a nice thing to say, Miss Lee, but my son was an utter and most unmitigated young scoundrel. If he came here he would be ordered out of the house. So far as I am concerned, I have no son at all. He sides with his mother, and his mother has a considerable private fortune of her own. Where she is at the present moment I have no idea. Nor do I care. Seems odd, does it not, that I should have been very fond of that woman at one time, just as it seems odd to think that I should have once been fond of treacle tart?"