In a moment of disconcerting lucidity she saw him as a strange man, flushed with drink and blown with license, looking on other women with a satyr's appraising eyes, bandying ribald wheezes with the lips she had so lately kissed. And she winced and drew away, recalling that abandon of affection with which she had given herself to his embrace at the hotel, feeling of a sudden soiled and shop-worn as from common handling.
A strange man, a man she had known but a few brief weeks!
Covertly watching him, she saw Summerlad in the middle of a passage of persiflage start and fall silent, his lips in an instant wiped bare of speech. And following the line of his stare, she espied, at some distance, at a table near the edge of the dance-floor, Bellamy sitting with a woman.
He saw her but made no sign more than to intensify his meaning smile, and immediately returned courteous attention to his companion.
At this last Lucinda stared in doubt for several seconds, she was so changed. But finery that shrieked of money spent without stint or taste could hardly disguise the wild and ragged loveliness of Nelly Marquis.
XXXII
In a freak of unaccountable reluctance to believe it was really the Marquis girl, Lucinda looked a second time. More than a month had passed since that brief, distressing chapter of their acquaintance, which Lucinda had put out of mind so completely that her efforts to recall the features of the other conjured up only a foggy impression of a shabby, haggard, haunted shadow, by turns wistful and feebly defiant, that bore what might be no more than chance likeness to this figure of flaunting extravagance at Bellamy's table.
A question forming on her lips, Lucinda turned back to Summerlad, but surprised the tail of his eye veering hastily away, and fancied a shade of over-elaboration in the easy, incurious air he was quick to resume; as if he wished her to believe he either hadn't noticed those two or else saw no significance in their association on terms apparently so intimate and mutually diverting.
So she held her tongue for a while, till the comforting suggestion offered that Lynn in all probability had but sought to spare her feelings....