"What do I see?" Apparently possessed by the belief that some sharp distraction was indicated if open hostilities were to be averted, Liane pounced upon Lanyard's barely tasted highball. "And this hour I have been dying of thirst!" She gulped with gusto, making eyes at Lanyard over the glass. "Yours, my friend? Never mind: Folly will fetch you another."
"Do with a drink myself," Pagan volunteered. "No, don't you trouble, Mrs. McFee, I know the way."
He ducked briskly out into the hall and was presently heard in the dining-room making melody with glasses and siphons and ice.
Liane set aside an empty glass, crossed to Lanyard, and petted his cheek with the authentic professional touch. "You mustn't mind Peter, mon coco," she cooed affectionately in French. "He presumes, perhaps, but then he's a privileged type."
"Mind him?" Lanyard questioned in a tone that implied he found the thought weird. "Vermin, my dear Liane, were ever my pet aversion. If you set any value on this insect, be good enough to keep him out from under my feet."
"Every time you do that," Folly grumbled in English, "you make me sick, to think of all the youth I wasted studying what I fondly thought was French."
Liane turned with a murmur of self-reproach, and gracefully posing on the broad arm of the easy chair passed a fair arm round Folly's even fairer shoulders.
"Forgive me, my pretty. Michael and I knew each other so long ago in that dear Paris of before the War, it goes against Nature to converse with him in any tongue but French. . . . Ah! my old one," she lamented to Lanyard. "Those old days! will we ever know their like again?"
Mistrustful of her drift, Lanyard briefly replied: "God forbid!"
Timely to catch the sense of these latter lines, Pagan returned, his countenance of a clown radiant with good nature restored by the fragrance of four eight-inch glasses on the tray beneath his nose.