"Your brilliant intellect, assisted by your personal dislike, has at once divined the truth, Mimi," said Levison, leaning back upon the divan and blowing a blue cloud of smoke up towards the hanging Moorish lamp.
"Why, then," Lord Ballina broke in suddenly—"why, then, it's this afternoon!" His voice had grown high and thin with excitement, and Levison saw once more a face from which all the color had ebbed, and hands that twitched with sudden realization.
Mimi Addington suddenly rose up from her seat with a curiously sinuous and panther-like movement.
"This afternoon!" she said. "Then I shall sleep happy this night!"
"Oh, come, Mimi," Lord Ballina said, "you needn't go quite so far as that. As a matter of fact, I—er—confound it, I wish we'd let the chap alone!"
The woman had sunk back upon the divan. She stretched out one slender, white hand, covered with flashing rings, and patted Levison upon the arm.
He shuddered at her touch, scoundrel as he was, but she did not see it.
Ballina was walking up and down the room, his feet making no sound upon the thick pile of the carpet. He snapped his fingers in an odd, convulsive fashion.
"I say, you know," he said at length, "I really don't like it. I wish to Heaven I'd never been mixed up in the affair. Supposing anything gets out?"
"Well, that's supposing me to be rather a bigger fool than I am," Levison answered, though the fear of the other had in some subtle way affected him, and all his own tremors of the morning were beginning to revive.