Mrs. Jack's big eyes turned to the laughing face that was raised up to Rhodes. "Don't believe a word he says, my dear," she suddenly called across the table. "And look out for him. He's dangerous."
Though she laughed, Rhodes must have sensed a serious motive, for he glanced up in quick annoyance. "Do I look it?" he asked, turning again to Helen.
Nature does not lie. His narrowly spaced eyes, salient facial angles, dull skin, heavy lips carried her certificate of degeneracy. A physiognomist would have pronounced him dangerous to innocence as a wild beast on less evidence, but to Helen's inexperience he appeared as a man unusually handsome, profile or front face. The significant angles did not alter the good modelling of his nose and chin or affect the regularity of his features. Tall, slim, irreproachable in manner and dress, there was no scratch to reveal the base metal beneath his electroplate refinement.
"You certainly don't," she answered, laughing.
"Then," he said, with mock gravity, "I can patiently suffer the sting of calumny."
"Calumny?" Mrs. Jack echoed, teasingly. "Calumny? What's that?"
"Synonyme for conscience," Edith Newton put in, with a spice of malice. For though the conquest of Rhodes—to which Regis gossip wickedly laid Newton's presence in the land office—was now stale with age and tiresome to herself, she was selfish enough to resent his defection.
"Sinclair found it while rummaging Fred's coat for matches," her husband added. Leslie's simplicity was as much of a joke to them as it was with the Canadian settlers, and, under cover of the laugh, Chapman—a big blond of that cavalry, mustached type which wins England's cricket matches while losing all her wars—leaned over and whispered in Newton's ear: "Leslie will lose more than his conscience if he doesn't look out. La belle Elinor is madly smitten." Aloud, he said, "Sinclair would hardly know what to do with it, Mrs. Newton."
"Hearken not to the tongue of envy, Mrs. Carter," Rhodes retaliated upon his tormentors. "I'm a very responsible person, I assure you."
She laughed at his mock seriousness, and, believing it all fooling, gave him so much of her attention that evening as to cause more than one comment. "Rhodes is making heavy running," Newton remarked once to Chapman, who replied, conceitedly stroking his mustache, "Wait till I get in my innings."