The Lord Chancellor was a little preoccupied by one of those irrational suspicions that will sometimes afflict the most intelligent of men. Why did Douglas want to know all the particulars about the Shonts ghosts? Why every now and then did he glance with that odd expression at one’s face,—a glance half appealing and half amused. Amused! It was a strange fancy, but the Lord Chancellor could almost have sworn that the young man was laughing at him. At dinner he had had that feeling one has at times of being talked about; he had glanced along the table to discover the Captain and a rather plain woman, that idiot Timbre’s wife she probably was, with their heads together looking up at him quite definitely and both manifestly pleased by something Douglas was telling her....
What was it Douglas had said in the train? Something like a threat. But the exact words had slipped the Lord Chancellor’s memory....
The Lord Chancellor’s preoccupation was just sufficient to make him a little unwary. He drifted into grappling distance of Mrs. Rampound Pilby. Her voice caught him like a lasso and drew him in.
“Well, and how is Lord Moggeridge now?” she asked.
What on earth is one to say to such an impertinence?
She was always like that. She spoke to a man of the calibre of Lord Bacon as though she was speaking to a schoolboy home for the holidays. She had an invincible air of knowing all through everybody. It gave rather confidence to her work than charm to her manner.
“Do you still go on with your philosophy?” she said.
“No,” shouted the Lord Chancellor, losing all self-control for the moment and waving his eyebrows about madly, “no, I go off with it.”
“For your vacations? Ah, Lord Moggeridge, how I envy you great lawyers your long vacations. I—never get a vacation. Always we poor authors are pursued by our creations, sometimes it’s typescript, sometimes it’s proofs. Not that I really complain of proofs. I confess to a weakness for proofs. Sometimes, alas! it’s criticism. Such undiscerning criticism!...”
The Lord Chancellor began to think very swiftly of some tremendous lie that would enable him to escape at once without incivility from Lady Laxton’s drawing-room. Then he perceived that Mrs. Rampound Pilby was asking him; “Is that the Captain Douglas, or his brother, who’s in love with the actress woman?”