"Oh hell, this is most frightfully disintegrating!" said Vicky, winking a sudden tear off the curling ends of her lashes. "Poor sweet, I always thought he was a complete liability, and now I'm sorry!"
"Well!" said Mr. Jones, looking after her retiring form with much disapproval, "she took it pretty coolly, I must say!"
"No reason why she shouldn't," replied White shortly. "She's only his stepdaughter. If you want hysterics, hang around until his wife comes on the scene! She'll provide you with them - though, if you ask me, she'd have been glad enough to have got rid of him any time these past two years!"
Vicky, speeding up the path to the house, reached the lawn where her hammock hung just as Hugh Dering came out of the drawing-room through the long open windows.
"Hullo!" said Hugh, taking in her bell-bottomed slacks, saffron straw sandals, and vermilion toe-nails in one awestricken glance. "I called to see Mary. Your butler thought she might be in the garden. Is she?"
"Oh, I don't know, but I shouldn't think so, and anyway you can't start a necking-party now, because it would be too utterly anachronous!" said Vicky distractedly.
"Thanks, but surprising though it may seem to you I hadn't come to start a necking-party, as you so prettily put it!" said Hugh, a somewhat frosty gleam lighting his eyes.
"Oh well, I wouldn't know! The most disjointing thing has happened, and it's made me cry slightly, though why it should I can't imagine, because I'm not much given to weeping."
"That accounts for it, then!" said Hugh, as one who was glad to have a mystery solved. "That filthy stuff you put on your eyelashes has run. The effect is even more peculiar than usual!"
Though Vicky could not appear to turn pale, she could flush quite unmistakably, and did so, stamping her foot, and darting so flashing a look at Hugh that he ought to have been withered on the spot. "I now know that you're a beast, and practically reeking of mothballs, or whatever it is you put with blankets, and winter coats, and everything else that's completely fusty! Also, you're as unfeeling as a cabbage, which is another thing you remind me of, and I suppose if you saw anyone stretched dead at your feet, you wouldn't shed a tear, but would just pass it off as a poor joke or something!"