The dinner was rather silent, for everyone was disappointed by the non-arrival of the travellers. Paul, who was in good form and the happy temper that Jenny Wick's presence always produced in him, did most of the talking, for he was intensely interested in a lot of new songs, Russian and Spanish, that he had just got and, with the naïvete that was in his case, as it so often is, only a form of selfishness, he assumed that everyone else was as deeply interested as he was.
Grisel, who had not seen her lover that day until he arrived rather late for dinner, told him in a low voice of her talk with her father on the telephone.
"He really was upset about something," she added at the end of the story. "Of course, he was not so upset as he seemed, but there is something wrong, I'm sure. I believe mother would take him back if Clara Crichell did not marry him after all."
"What on earth makes you think that she won't marry him?" he asked, puzzled. "No woman alive would go through all this business of the divorce and the publicity unless she really cared for the man."
Grisel shrugged her thin shoulders. "Oh, well, I don't know. You see, we know him so well that I suppose we instinctively fear she may have got to know him and—and—not liked what she has learnt."
It struck Barclay as a very sad thing for a man that his own daughter should judge him in this unrancorous but pitiless way.
"I rather like your father, you know," he said slowly, "in some ways. He is very much nicer away from home than he is in it."
"He must be," she answered, with the charity of utter indifference. "He must be charming somewhere, and he certainly isn't when he is here!"
"It struck me the last time I saw him," Barclay went on slowly, "that he was not—very happy. I suppose he misses your mother."
Grisel stirred, and he hastened to explain.