“He strikes me as a person with infinite capacity for holding his cards. That is all. But perhaps he has no good cards in his hand? Nothing but rubbish—the twos and threes of ordinary drawing-room smartness—and never a trump. Who can tell? Qui vivra verra, Miss. Roden. It may not be in my time that the world shall hear of Tony Cornish—the real world, not the journalistic world, I mean. He may ripen slowly, and I shall be dead. I am getting elderly. How old do you think I am, Miss Roden?”
“Thirty-five,” replied Dorothy; and Mrs. Vansittart turned sharply to look at her.
“Ah!” she said, slowly and thoughtfully. “Yes, you are quite right. That is my age. And I suppose I look it. I suppose others would have guessed with equal facility, but not everybody would have had the honesty to say what they thought.”
Dorothy laughed and changed colour. “I said it without thinking,” she answered. “I hope you do not mind.”
“No, I do not mind,” said Mrs. Vansittart, looking out of the window. “But we were talking of Mr. Cornish.”
“Yes,” answered Dorothy, buttoning her glove and glancing at the clock. “Yes; but I must not talk any longer or I shall be late, and my brother expects to find me at home when he returns from the works.”
She rose and shook hands, looking Mrs. Vansittart in the eyes. When Dorothy had gone, the lady of the house stood for a minute looking at the closed door.
“I wonder what she thinks of me?” she said.
And Dorothy Roden, walking down Park Straat, was doing the same. She was wondering what she thought of Mrs. Vansittart.
Although it was the month of April, the winter mists still rose at evening and swept seawards from the marshes of Leyden. The trees had scarcely begun to break into bud, for it had been a cold spring, and the ice was floating lazily on the canal as Dorothy walked along its bank. The Villa des Dunes was certainly somewhat lonely, standing as it did a couple of hundred yards back from a sandy road—one of the many leading from The Hague to Scheveningen. Between the villa and the road the dunes had scarcely been molested, except indeed, to cut a narrow roadway to the house. When Dorothy reached home, she found that her brother had not yet returned. She looked at the clock. He was later than usual. The malgamite works had during the last few weeks been absorbing more and more of his attention. When he returned home, tired, in the evening, he was not communicative. As for Otto von Holzen, he never showed his face outside the works now, but seemed to live the life of a recluse within the iron fence that surrounded the little colony.