The conversation, once started, ran easily enough. Although he never mentioned India, Cheniston was ready enough to talk of Egypt, where for some years he had made his home; and Iris, to whose young imagination the very name of that mysterious land was a charm, listened entranced to his description of a trip he had lately taken up the Nile.
"You are an engineer, Mr. Cheniston?" Anstice interpolated a polite question and Cheniston answered in the same tone.
"Yes. And engineering in the land of the Pharaohs is no joke. You must remember that we, as engineers, are only now where they were thousands of years ago. I mean that our present-day feats, the Dam at Assouan, wonderful as it is, and the rest, are mere child's play compared with the marvels they constructed in their day."
"So I have been told before." Only Anstice knew how hard it was to sit there conversing as though he and this man shared no tragic memory in common. "But if Egyptologists are to be believed there is hardly any invention, any scientific discovery—so called—which wasn't known to the Egyptians many thousands of years before the birth of Christ."
"They even possessed aeroplanes, didn't they?" asked Iris, smiling; and Bruce Cheniston turned to her with an involuntary softening in his rather harsh voice.
"So it is stated, I believe," he said, with an answering smile. "And it is generally believed that in the lost Continent of Atlantis——"
He went on talking, not monopolizing the conversation, but keeping it going so skilfully that Iris, at least, did not recognize the fact that both Mrs. Carstairs and Anstice were more than ordinarily silent as the meal progressed.
When the short but perfect dinner was finished Chloe rose.
"We will have coffee in the drawing-room, Bruce," she said as she moved slowly to the door. "If you are not too long over your cigarettes I daresay Miss Wayne will sing for us."
"With that inducement we shall soon follow you," said Cheniston gravely; and as Iris passed through the door which Anstice held open for her she gave him a friendly little smile which somehow nerved him for the ordeal which he foresaw to be at hand.