He looked at her. There was something about her face which attracted his attention, something unusual.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“You,” he said bluntly, for they were out of hearing of the other two. “If I were poetically minded I should say that you looked like the Tragic Muse.”
“Do I?” she answered, laughing. “Well, that is curious, because I feel like Comedy herself.”
“There’s something wrong with that woman,” thought the Colonel to himself as he extracted two couple of snipe from his capacious coat tails. “I wonder what it is.”
Just then Mr. Quest and Edward Cossey passed out into the garden talking.
“Here are the snipe, Mrs. Quest,” he said. “I have had rather good luck. I killed four couple and missed two couple more; but then I had a new gun, and one can never shoot so well with a new gun.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said, “do pull out the ‘painters’ for me. I like to put them in my riding hat, and I can never find them myself.”
“Very well,” he answered, “but I must go into the garden to do it; there is not light enough here. It gets dark so soon now.”
Accordingly he stepped out through the window, and began to hunt for the pretty little feathers which are to be found at the angle of a snipe’s wing.