“Well,” he said, “the old man’s been frozen out for nearly an hour. Didn’t it make you feel conscience-stricken to see me hanging round the doorway looking hungrily at this chair?”
“I was dying for that man to go,” she answered. “I did everything but ask him.”
“Oh, you sinner!” he said, looking into her dancing eyes. “Where will you go to when you die?”
“Where do you think you will?” she asked, grave, but with her dimple faintly suggested. “I’d like to know, because then I can arrange to have just about the same sort of record, and we could go together.”
He could not restrain his laughter, and she added in her most caressing tone,
“It would be so dreary for you to go to one place and me to be in another.”
Before he could answer she had raised her eyes, glanced at the door, and then suddenly flushed, her face disclosing a sort of sudden quick snap into focused attention.
“Mr. Barclay,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t expect to see him to-night.”
The Colonel turned his head and saw Jerry Barclay entering the room in the company of a lady and gentleman. Many other people looked at them as they moved to where Mrs. Davenport stood, for they were unquestionably a noticeable trio.
The woman was in the middle, and between the proud and distinguished figure of Barclay and the small, insignificant one of her other escort, she presented a striking appearance. She was of a large, full build, verging on embonpoint, but still showing a restrained luxuriance of outline. A dress of white lace clothed her tightly and swept in creamy billows over the carpet behind her. It was cut in a square at her neck, and the sleeves ended at her elbows, revealing a throat and forearms of milky whiteness. This ivory purity of skin was noticeable in her face, which was firmly modeled, rather heavy in feature, and crowned with a coronet of lusterless black hair. She was hardly handsome, but there was something sensational, arresting, slightly repelling, in the sleepy and yet vivid vitality that seemed to emanate from her.