"I wonder," inquired Pallister meditatively, "what would happen if you just had to sneeze?"
But Jack declined to venture an opinion.
"I'm afraid I can't promise to be done," Evarne declared with some degree of emphasis.
"Now, would you expect anybody to consent after that lurid description, Jack?" inquired Geoff, laughing. "It's a good thing Winborough can't hear your vivid reminiscences, or he would suddenly recall some other imperative engagement for Wednesday afternoon."
"Perhaps he won't come anyhow," suggested Pallister, bent on teasing. "You should just have heard a Socialist gentleman—one of your pet pals, I dare say, Jack—who was addressing an attentive and admiring audience in Hyde Park yesterday. 'These bloated haristiscrats, pampered from their cots upwards,' he declared, were, without exception, fickle and false and altogether unreliable, and 'ought to be wiped off the face of the globe altogether!'"
"But Lord Winborough hasn't been 'pampered from his cot upwards,'" returned Jack unperturbed. "He only came into the title about five years ago, so you see he is scarcely one of those whom 'my pet pal, the Socialist,' was referring to."
Pallister ceased grinning at his own wit.
"Oh, of course, I know. He will keep his promise right enough," he said seriously. Then, suddenly recollecting himself: "I say, Geoff, I didn't mean to be personal. If your cousin goes and dies without children, we don't expect you to alter, and be fickle and false and all the rest of it, just because you become Earl of Winborough, eh?"
Evarne's lips parted, and, turning her head, she gazed at Geoff with eyes filled with utter amazement and incredulity. That young man threw down his brushes.
"Look here," he said lightly, "it's a quarter to one. I think we had better stop work and have lunch."