“You are changed too. You are years older. Is it your advancing success, or what? … I don’t say it isn’t becoming,” with a dash of her old banter—“but it seems sudden.”
He raised his eyes slowly and looked into her face with an expression that in some way hurt her. It was the look of a devoted dog, craving forgiveness.
She pushed her cup away impatiently, half laughing and half serious.
“Don’t look at me like that, Baby,” striving blindly to rally him—“you make me feel as if I had smacked you.”
He laughed to reassure her, and changed the subject to Norway, trying to keep her mind from further questioning concerning himself and Lorraine.
After tea she left him to go down to Shoreditch with Dick, first meeting him and the forlorn “G” at the Cheshire Cheese for their usual high tea.
It had become quite an institution now that “G” should join them, and, as Hal had predicted, she and Dick were firm friends. It was the brightest spot of the music-teacher’s life since Basil Hayward died, and neither of them would have disappointed her for the world if they could help it.
Tonight Quin was there also, so Hal was able to get a few words privately with Dick.
“What in the world is the matter with Alymer?” she asked. “I had tea with him this afternoon. He seems awfully down on his luck.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Dick answered. “He is certainly not very gay—yet that last case he won before the Law Courts closed should have put him in fine feather for the whole vacation. Did you ask him if anything was wrong?”