The fitting concluded and Miss Pope dismissed, Mrs. Atterbury turned to the girl.
"A few friends are dining with me tonight and I do not want you to appear in that sombre black. I have had Caroline put one of my waists in your room which I think you can manage to wear. Come down to the drawing-room early, please."
Betty obeyed, but found that some of the guests had already arrived. Mme. Cimmino was curled up felinely in a corner of the great davenport, a cigarette between her fingers and a spot of red glowing in each sallow cheek. She was talking rapidly with shrugs and darting, nervous gestures, to a tall, white-haired, distinguished stranger who was introduced as Doctor Bayard.
Wolvert stood alone, with one arm resting on the mantel. He was gazing into the fire and his face in the flickering glare seemed aged and shrunken, the high cheek bones glazed like those of a skull and the pale eyes shadowed.
Mrs. Atterbury was conversing with two other men by the door and as Betty was presented she took furtive note of them. The first, Leonard Ide, was a mere youth with a receding chin and vacant, glassy eyes. His dinner coat was extreme to the point of foppishness, but its dashing lines could not conceal the narrow stooped shoulders and hollow chest beneath. The hand he extended was cold and clammy to the girl's touch, and his high, thin voice grated unpleasantly on her ear.
The other was in appearance almost humorously antithetical. Short and stocky, with a rotund paunch, and bushy, iron-gray hair, he stood with his plump legs set wide apart and his eyes twinkled benignly behind huge rimmed glasses as he bowed his salutations. His voice was deep and gutteral with a decided accent and his ruddy face glowed in the firelight. Betty did not catch his name, but the others called him "Professor."
The pale youth attempted to engage her in conversation with an air of bored patronage which would have amused her under other circumstances, but as she looked from face to face, one question rang insistently through her brain. Did they know? The old gentleman with the air of an aristocrat, the jovial Professor, the spineless youth—could they bear the burden of guilty knowledge in common with the rest?
There was an undercurrent of perfect understanding, a veiled intimacy about the scattered group, ill-assorted as it was, which suggested a closer bond than that of old acquaintanceship. Betty could not have defined the sensation which assailed her but she felt that her every move and intonation were being weighed in the balance, as one brought before a tribunal.
Wolvert had turned from the fire-place and was approaching her, when the door was once more flung open, and Welch announced:
"Mr. and Mrs. Dana."