Now she snatched her hand away. "Oh!" with a catch in her voice, "that is unworthy of you."
"And you are keeping me from what is at least a chance to discharge it."
"It is not I who keeps you from it."
The blood rushed to Ingram's head. "Some occult tribunal, then—some inquisition against whose unwarrantable interference my whole soul protests."
"Hush!" for he had raised his voice. "I think I hear a ring. People are beginning to arrive, and I must fly. Come down in about five minutes—it will look better—and wait after the rest are gone. I think you had best understand my position in this matter clearly. That much is due you."
XII
A CATASTROPHE
Checked in mid-course, and with all his righteous indignation bottled up, Paul, I expect, hardly found the "worldly" dinner a diverting affair. He had reached the stage of mental development—a mid-way one, be it noted—where types interest more than persons, and none of those he met to-night aroused in him anything save a burning desire for their speedy effacement. Lumsden did not appear to remember him, which was hardly wonderful, considering the complete change of dress and environment. Besides which the baronet was a man very much occupied and in request throughout dinner. He was just back from the Côte d'Azur, and was primed with the true inwardness of the approaching Manby-Millett sensation. Lucy Millett was passing through Paris alone, and thought it civil to leave a card on the only Mrs. Manby at the Superbe because she had sent her a wedding present. Mrs. Manby's reputation hadn't reached her, it seems, which was hardly wonderful, seeing Lucy was a daughter of the great Quaker sago-refining family, and rather out of things. She had left her own card and her husband's, and by a mistake of the clerk only the smaller card was handed to the gay lady on her return. Result: that Lucy found a petit bleu waiting when she got back from a round of the shops, which gave everything away. "Most impassioned," Lumsden understood, on good authority, and quite up to Manby form.
"And if you put that in one of your books, Mrs. Hepworth, people would say there was too much—what d'you call it?—coincidence, wouldn't they, now?"
It happened that Lady Robert Millett had been the first woman Ingram had interviewed for the Parthenon. He remembered the sandy haired girl-wife at Isleworth, with her high teeth, awkward kindness and innocent pride, who had given him tea and, "as a special favor," shown him her white squirrels and blue-wattled Japanese fowl. Well—her happiness was destroyed. He did not join in the laughter when some one achieved a stammering, knock-kneed epigram in French; something about sagou and sagesse.