As they entered the drawing-room, Miss Wycliffe closed her book with satisfied emphasis and rose to meet them. The bishop was there also, standing in the background and waiting his turn. His eyes were on his daughter rather than on his guests, with a pride that was evident at even a casual glance. Again Leigh encountered that look which had so deeply attracted him. Her eyes were very dark, and almost misty in their warm light, as if she were somewhat dazed by long perusal of the printed page. She possessed also that mark of feminine beauty so prized by the ancients, a low forehead, and there was a suggestion of the classic in the arrangement of her hair. He found her smile peculiarly winning, and was conscious of the responsiveness of her fingers, so different from the limp passivity of many a feminine greeting. Though not more given to self-importance than the average young man, he was somehow aware that she too remembered their first casual encounter. Her failure to mention it now served only to invest it with the greater significance.
"Miss Felicity," Cardington began, when they had become seated, "I suspect that you were racing against time, endeavouring, in fact, to finish that book before our arrival should interrupt you."
"You would not have been welcome a moment sooner," she admitted.
"Felicity is a deep student in shallow literature," the bishop put in epigrammatically.
"As if Zola were ever shallow," she said. "I'll leave it with Mr. Leigh."
"You can search me for an opinion," he replied; and in the breezy colloquialism of the expression, no less than in a certain vividness of manner, his isolation from the others became apparent. "My French reading is mostly confined to astronomical monographs."
"Miss Felicity," Cardington interposed, with an elaborate and old-fashioned gallantry that became him, "Mr. Leigh is a student of stars, and therefore he is more concerned with the reader than with the book. If you will persist in shining upon him so dazzlingly, you cannot be surprised if he turns an unseeing eye upon any object you may present for his inspection. Now, since I have basked longer in your light, I may perhaps—allow me." He reached for the book and began to turn over the leaves. She watched his growing absorption with indulgent amusement, and the comradeship of the two omnivorous readers was evident. Cardington was frankly reading, oblivious of his hosts, a liberty which indicated his familiar standing in that house.
"I have a weakness for polymathists of the old school," the bishop remarked, harking back to his guest's confession of narrower interests, "of which class I may say that Professor Cardington is almost the only example within my range of observation. I have noticed that Latin is becoming as strange to the average graduate as Eliot's Indian Bible."
"But Latin does n't help the modern world to build railroads, or battleships, or motor cars," Leigh suggested, by way of presenting the opposite view.
"Always the argument of utility," the bishop returned, with mournful resignation. "But how have modern inventions added to the beauty or the dignity of human life? Man is mastered and slain by his own inventions, and a skyscraper reduces him to the proportions of an ant."