Barncastle flushed. The ladies toyed nervously with their fans. Lady Alice appeared slightly perturbed, and Hopkins grew pale. The Duchess of Bangletop alone was unmoved. Toppleton's heat was hardly what was expected on an occasion of this sort, but the duchess had made up her mind not to marvel at anything the guest of the evening might do, and she regarded his vehemence as quite pardonable inasmuch as it must be characteristic of an unadulterated Americanism.
"Fancy!" she said. "Do you mean to say, Mr. Toppleton, that you can tell by a face what sort of a life one has led; what his or her character has been, is, and is to be?"
"I do, Duchess," returned Toppleton. "Though for your comfort as well as for that of others at this table, let me add that I invariably keep what I see religiously to myself."
The humour of this rejoinder and the laughter which followed it cleared the atmosphere somewhat, but from the gravity of his host and the tense way in which Barncastle's eye was fastened upon him, Hopkins knew that his shaft as to the baffling qualities of Barncastle's face had struck home.
"You interest me," said the Earl, when the mirth of his guests had subsided. "I too have studied physiognomy, but I never observed that there was anything baffling about my own. I am really quite interested to know why you find it so."
"Because," said Toppleton nervously yet firmly, "because your face is not consistent with your record. Because you have achieved more than one could possibly read in or predict from your face."
"I always said that myself, Barncastle," said the duchess airily. "I've always said you didn't look like a great man."
"While acknowledging, Duchess, that I nevertheless am?" queried Barncastle with a smile.
"Well, moderately so, Barncastle, moderately so. Fact is," said the Duchess, "you can stir a multitude with your eloquence; you can write a novel that so will absorb a school-girl that she can't take her eyes from its early pages to look into the back of the book and see how it is all going to turn out; you can talk a hostile parliament into doing violence to its secret convictions; but in some respects you are wanting. You are an atrocious horse-back rider, you never take a run with the hounds, and I must say I have seen times when you seemed to me to be literally too big for yourself."
"By Jove!" thought Toppleton. "What a clever fellow I am! If this duchess is so competent a reader of character as her estimate of Barncastle shows her to be, it's a marvel she hasn't found me out."