The next morning there were two absentees from the breakfast-table—General Sadgrove, who by overnight arrangement had breakfasted by himself, so as to be driven to Tarrant Road in time for the nine o'clock train to town, and Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was confined to her bed by a bad headache. The news of the indisposition was imparted to Sybil by the maid Rosa at her mistress's door, and was accompanied by a regretful but firm refusal of admission to the patient.
"Madame is so désolée not to receive you, ma'amselle, but she 'ave ze malady too strr-rong for speak even with her dearest friend," was the ultimatum which sent Miss Hanbury from the door with a doleful face, which somehow took quite a different expression when she had turned the corner.
For some mysterious reason her aloofness from her lover vanished that morning, and she and Forsyth were on the best of terms. They spent two hours together wandering in the park, where in one of the more remote glades Azimoolah flitted up to them from the bushes, and, regarding Sybil with awe-struck veneration, made a deep salaam and was gone. The Duke, who had given his word of honor to the General not to go beyond the park gates, passed the time partly with his bailiff and partly strolling with Leonie in the gardens and glass-houses. The friendship between Beaumanoir and his beautiful guest, so promisingly begun on board the St. Paul, seemed to have lost ground. Though he was much in her society, he avoided intimate topics, and often puzzled her with a hastily averted look of wistful tenderness in strange contrast to his assiduous but commonplace hospitality.
Half an hour before luncheon General Sadgrove, returning on foot from the station and looking five years older for his run up to London, met the two young couples, who had now joined forces, as they were entering the mansion. Forsyth gave his uncle an anxious glance of inquiry, but the old man passed him by unheeding, and addressed the Duke in a tone of icy formality.
"I shall be obliged if your Grace will give me five minutes in the library on a very urgent matter," he said, adding, with significant emphasis, "I have been with Mr. Ziegler this morning."
Beaumanoir, gone all pale and tremulous, made a palpable effort at self-control as he replied:
"Come into the library by all means, General. But I am afraid you will find me quite as reticent as I am sure Ziegler was."
The interview lasted till long after the luncheon gong had sounded, and when at length the Duke and the General entered the dining-room two pairs of watchful eyes observed that their relative attitudes had been reversed. The General's usually impassive face was working so painfully that Mrs. Sadgrove half rose from her chair at sight of her husband, checking herself with difficulty; while the Duke bore himself almost jauntily, and began chaffing Sybil about her devotion to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was still, by latest bulletin from Rosa, "suffering ze grand torments" and unable to leave her room.
The afternoon passed without external signs that the house-party was living on the verge of an active volcano. But as it was growing dusk Forsyth, at the risk of being late for dinner, took a solitary walk in the direction of a certain stile, by which the Prior's Tarrant pastures were approached by a short cut across fields from Tarrant Road railway station. He arrived at the stile in the nick of time to give a helping hand to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who had just reached the spot from the opposite direction. The hour was the one when the guests at the house might be expected to be dressing for dinner, and it also tallied with the arrival of a London train at the station; but neither alluded to these incidentals of such an obviously chance meeting.
"I trust that your headache is better," said Forsyth, politely.