Lucinda shook her head slowly, watching him with a half-smile lambent with lazy intelligence. He felt vaguely uneasy, as who should of a sudden find himself hard by the brink of some abysmal indiscretion.
"Thought we might meet somewhere for luncheon, if you're lunching out."
"I'd love to." Lucinda put out an arm deliciously rounded beneath skin of a texture fairer and finer than any other Bellamy had ever seen, and took a morocco-bound engagement book from her escritoire. "Let me see...." She riffled the leaves. "I know I've got some shopping to do——"
"Have you, now!"
"And Mrs. Rossiter Wade's bridge-tea for some charity or other this afternoon, but.... Oh, yes! I'm having Fanny Lontaine to lunch at the Ritz, with Nelly Guest and Jean Sedley. What a pity. Though nothing can prevent your coming, too, if you like."
A dark suspicion knitted Bellamy's eyebrows. "Some actress? Sounds like it."
"Fanny Lontaine?" Needless to ask which he meant, the other women were fixtures of their immediate circle. Lucinda laughed. "Nothing of the sort. Fanny was at school with me—Frances Worth——"
"Chicago people?" Bellamy put in with symptoms of approval. "Not a bad lot. Old man Worth—'Terror of the Wheat Pit', they called him—died not long ago in the odour of iniquity, leaving eighty millions or so. Your little schoolmate ought to be fairly well-fixed."
"I don't know, I'm sure. I believe it's something to do with the will that brought them over. Fanny's father disliked Harry Lontaine, so Fanny had to run away to marry him and was duly excommunicated by the family. She's lived in England ever since; her husband's an Englishman."
"I see: another of your charity cases."