"And can you do it equally well from Melton?" demanded Mr. Sutton. "I can send you in every morning in the car."
Vane banished the vision of breakers ahead, and decided that he could do the job admirably from Melton.
"Then come right along and put your bag in the car." The old gentleman, with his hand on Vane's arm, rushed him out of the smoking-room, leaving the commercial traveller pondering deeply as to whether he had silently acquiesced in a new variation of the confidence trick. . . .
"We've got Joan Devereux staying with us," said Mr. Sutton, as the chauffeur piled the rugs over them. "You know her, don't you?"
"We have met," answered Vane briefly.
"Just engaged to that fellow Baxter. Pots of money." The car turned out on to the London road, and the old man rambled on without noticing Vane's abstraction. "Deuced good thing too—between ourselves. Sir James—her father, you know—was in a very queer street. . . . Land, my boy, is the devil these days. Don't touch it; don't have anything to do with it. You'll burn your fingers if you do. . . . Of course, Blandford is a beautiful place, and all that, but, 'pon my soul, I'm not certain that he wouldn't have been wiser to sell it. Not certain we all wouldn't be wiser to sell, and go and live in furnished rooms at Margate. . . . Only if we all did, it would become the thing to do, and we'd soon get turned out of there by successful swindlers. They follow one round, confound 'em—trying to pretend they talk the same language."
"When is Miss Devereux going to be married?" asked Vane as the old man paused for breath.
"Very soon. . . . Fortnight or three weeks. Quite a quiet affair, you know; Baxter is dead against any big function. Besides, he has to run over to France so often, and so unexpectedly, that it might have to be postponed a day or two at the last moment. Makes it awkward if half London has been asked."
The car swung through the gates and rolled up the drive to the house. The brown tints of autumn were just beginning to show on the trees, and an occasional fall of dead leaves came fluttering down as they passed underneath. Then, all too quickly for Vane, they were at the house, and the chauffeur was holding open the door of the car. Now that he was actually there—now that another minute would bring him face to face with Joan—he had become unaccountably nervous.
He followed Mr. Sutton slowly up the steps, and spent an unnecessarily long time taking off his coat. He felt rather like a boy who had been looking forward intensely to his first party, and is stricken with shyness just as he enters the drawing-room.