This was a direct challenge to the priest to come, without further delay, to the matter of his visit. Hamish Traherne accepted it.
“We came really,” he said, “to see you, Renshaw. A little later, perhaps before we go, we must have our conversation. We hardly expected to have the pleasure of finding Miss Philippa sitting up so late.”
Dr. Raughty, who all this while had been watching with the most intense delight the beauty of the girl’s white skin and scarlet lips and the indescribable charm of her sinuous figure, now broke in impetuously.
“But it can wait! It can wait! Oh, please don’t go to bed yet, Miss Renshaw. Look, your cigarette’s out! Throw it away and try one of these. They’re French, they’re the yellow packets, I know you like them. They’re what you smoked once when we were on the river—when you caught that great perch.”
Philippa, who had risen to her feet at Traherne’s somewhat brusque remark, came at once to the Doctor’s side.
“Oh, the perch,” she cried, “yes, I should think I do remember! You insisted on killing it at once so that it shouldn’t jump back into the water. You put your thumb into its mouth and bent back its head. Oh, yes! That yellow packet brings it all back to me. I can smell the sticky dough we tried to catch dace with afterwards and I can see the look of your hands all smeared with blood and silver scales. Oh, that was a lovely day, Doctor! Do you remember how you twisted those things, bryony leaves they were, round my head when the others had gone? Do you remember how you said you’d like to treat me as you treated the perch? Do you remember how you ran after a dragon-fly or something?”
She stopped breathlessly and, balancing herself on the arm of the Doctor’s chair, blew a great cloud of smoke over his head, filling the room in a moment with the pungent odour of French tobacco.
Both Traherne and Brand regarded her with astonishment. She seemed to have transformed herself and to have become a completely different person. Her eyes shone with childish gaiety and when she laughed, as she did a moment afterwards at some sally of the Doctor’s, there was a ring of unforced, spontaneous merriment in the sound such as her brother had not heard for many years. She continued to bend over Dr. Raughty’s chair, covering them both in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, and the two of them soon became absorbed in some intricate discussion concerning, as far as the others could make out, the question of the best bait to be used for pike.
The priest took the opportunity of delivering himself of what was on his mind.