In the middle of all this freshness two people were—a man and a woman.
One, Lord Ellerdine, was very tall and lean. He was dressed in a suit of very immaculate grey flannel—not the greyish-green which the ordinary person who wears flannels imagines to be the right thing, but the real grey-grey which costs a good deal of money; if the tailors in Sackville Street and Waterloo Place, from whom we suffer, are to be believed.
Lord Ellerdine's hair—and he hadn't much of it—was what he himself would have described as "the same old dust-colour." He wore a stiff double collar with blue lines upon it, a tie of China silk, and a big black pearl, stuck right down at the bottom, so that it only peeped out from the opening of his waistcoat now and again.
Lord Ellerdine had red eyes—that is to say, that there was a sort of red glint in them. The brows which overhung them were straight and dark, and contradicted with an odd grotesquerie the flickering attempt to really be at home and happy with the world. The face itself was rather tanned and brown, lean in contour and suggesting the explorer and the travelled man; and all this was oddly contradicted by an engaging little button of a mouth, which twitched and lisped and was always rather more jolly than the occasion warranted.
By the side of Lord Ellerdine—or rather standing in the middle of the room and looking down upon him, for he had thrown himself upon the sofa—was a tall, slim, and gracious woman, perfectly dressed in a travelling coat and skirt of tweed. She looked round her rather fretfully.
Her face was radiant—there is no other word for it. Although she had been travelling all night, she appeared to be as fresh as paint—and that exactly describes her.
The complexion was perfect. It had that creamy morbidezza one sees in a furled magnolia bud. Two straight, decisive lips seemed like a "band of scarlet upon a tower of ivory." Lady Attwill's eyes were sapphire-blue and suspicious, but entirely charming. She was, in short, a thoroughly handsome woman, and the sunlight struck curious radiances from the little pearls she wore in the shell-like lobes of her ears.
"Tell madame, will you, Pauline?" she said.
"I'll tell madame that you have arrived," the maid said with a little bow. She crossed the room, knocked, opened the door leading into Mrs. Admaston's bedroom, and disappeared.
Almost immediately Lady Attwill's face changed from its quiet calm and became vivid.