CHAPTER IV.
THE TELEGRAM.
'By Jingo, there is old Pudd's carriage at the door, and his wife in it—a deuced fine girl, a stunning girl indeed!'
'Queer time this, to bring her up to London, when there is not a soul in town.'
'Perhaps that is the very reason he has done so.'
'I'll invite old Pudd down to the cub-hunting, and, if he brings her with him, won't I improve the shining hour!'
The speakers were two very blasé but good-looking young men, who were lounging in the bay window of the otherwise empty room of a stately club-house overlooking Pall Mall, then lonely, dusty, rather sun-baked, and the chief figures in which were the sentinels of the Guards at the War-Office and Marlborough House, and who, with no small interest, had seen Sir Paget Puddicombe's open carriage drop him at the door, where he waved his hand to Eveline as she drove away to shop or go round the park.
Now, Sir Harry Hurdell, a sporting baronet, well known on the turf and at Tattersall's, and his chief chum, Mr. Pyke Poole, a famous hand at billiards, more skilled with the cue than any marker in London, were not Sir Paget's style of men, for both were horsey, fast, given to gambling and loose living, but both were anxious to stand in the good graces of one who, as they phrased it, 'was proprietor of such a devilish handsome girl.'
They had not seen him since his marriage, on which both complimented and congratulated him in such well-chosen terms that he felt quite flattered, and his heart warmed to them.
It flashed upon him that by the society of other young men it was possible to neutralise—if he did nothing more—the recollection of Evan Cameron in the mind of Eveline, and thus it was that he said,
'We are quite alone in town, but will you dine with us to-day?'