“Yes, rather, if I can raise the funds. The nuisance is the tipping. There’s always such a rotten lot of servants; and I’m too much afraid of them to give anything but gold.”
The tea came in, and she saw him glance round for the chair best suited to his bulk.
“My chairs were not designed for giants,” she told him laughingly; “you will have to come and sit on the settee.”
He came at once, stretching his long legs out before him, with lazy ease, and then drawing his knees up sharply, as if in sudden remembrance that he was a guest and they were comparative strangers. Lorraine liked him, both for the moment’s forgetfulness and the sudden remembrance, and as she glanced again at his beautiful head and splendid shoulders, she was conscious of a sudden thrill of appreciative admiration.
Hal was right in naming him Apollo. The Sun God might have been fashioned just so, when first he ravished the eyes of Venus.
“And so the duchess took you into her boudoir?” she asked, with an unaccountable twinge of jealousy. “I do not know her. I’m afraid my friends are not so aristocratic as yours. But I believe she is considered very handsome.”
“Hard,” he said, with an old-fashioned air. “Handsome enough, but very hard. I did not like her nearly so much as Lady Moir, her sister.”
“Still no doubt she was very nice to you?”
Lorraine rather hated herself for the question. The ways of aristocratic ladies, whose idle hours often supply a field of labour for the Evil One, were perfectly well known to her; and she wondered a little sharply how far he was still unspoilt. The majority of big, strong, full-blooded young men in his place would assuredly have sipped the cup of pleasure pretty deeply by now, even at his years, but with that fine, strong face, and the clear, frank eyes was he of these? She believed not, and was glad.
He did not treat her question as if it implied any special favours, and merely replied jocularly: