"When can you go?" he went on, pursuing his advantage with a beaming face. "Could you go to-morrow?"
"I'm afraid I've got to go to Derby," Sir John put in. "I'm motoring two men down on rather important business."
"And on Friday," Grisel added hastily, "I've an engagement."
"What about Saturday?" he insisted, thoroughly enjoying himself.
"Saturday I'm going to be with Maud all day."
He shrugged his shoulders. "There you are! Always busy. But I do want you to meet Doll. I'm sure you'll like her. She's awfully interested in you. I think," he added fatuously as his downright little sister stared at him in amazement approaching open-mouthed astonishment, "she was inclined to be—well, it sounds ridiculous, but girls are all alike—to be a little jealous of you just at first, Grisel. But of course that's all right now."
Grisel tossed her head. "I should think so," she retorted.
Sir John watched them with a puzzled look in his clear eyes. Their talk seemed to him to be in surprisingly bad taste. He had noticed before that the subject of Miss Perkins seemed to bring out in them both a quality that he could not define, but that he greatly disliked, and it was odd that Grisel at such moments displeased him far more than young Wick. He was a clear-sighted man who had seen a good deal of the world, and of course it had not escaped him that Wick must only very recently have been in love with Grisel, for sometimes he had caught in the young man's eyes a look that was at least reminiscent of a stronger feeling than Miss Perkins might have approved of. He felt a mild curiosity about Miss Perkins, whose photograph he had seen, and whose beauty was undeniable, and he remembered that the last time Wick had been at the house he had dropped on the floor, and left, a fat letter in a delicate grey envelope, addressed in a pretty hand, and that Grisel, who had found it, remarked, as he propped it up against a brass candlestick: "Chiswick postmark. Miss Perkins, of course."
Barclay reflected, as he walked home that night, that if it were not for Miss Perkins he should feel extremely sorry for young Wick. He liked the boy. He liked him for his initiative and general air of success. Incidentally he knew through a friend who was high up in the hierarchy in Fleet Street, of which the head was a man whom Oliver called his Chief, of this youth's recent and rapid promotion, and the confidential position to which he had been raised over the heads of dozens of more experienced and older men. He had said nothing of these things at "Happy House," and so far as he could judge Oliver was regarded there still as the unimportant, though pushful reporter, who had been sent to write up Hermione's wedding in the previous July. Why the young man was concealing his remarkable advance Barclay had no idea. But he did not consider it his business to tell what he knew, and even Wick himself had no idea of his rival's information. "The beautiful Miss Perkins," the elder man thought, as he walked along in the bright moonlight, "will be My Lady before she has been married five years, or I'm very much mistaken."