Angela held him the tighter and looked tenderly into his eyes with her great Creole eyes, surely inherited from some southern foremother. He thought he heard Helen giggle softly. “My dear Dr. Latham! Oh!”—then, with a sudden change of manner, that was one of her most bewildering traits, an instant change this time from the hysterical to the commonplace—“You will have lunch with me to-morrow—half-past one.” It was not a question, but simply an announcement.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Latham began. “I am returning to town on an early train.” Yes, he did hear Helen smother a laugh?—hang the girl! and that was Hugh’s chuckle.
“Pouf!” Angela Hilary blew his words aside as if they had been a wisp of thistledown. “Then you’ll have to change your plans and take a later one.”
“But really I——”
“We’ll consider it settled. You men here all need reforming,” she added severely to Hugh, catching his eye. “In America we women bring up our men perfectly: they do us great credit.”
“But this is not America,” Stephen Pryde interposed indolently.
Angela Hilary drew herself up to all her lovely, graceful height. “But I am American—an American woman.” She said it very quietly. No English woman living could have said it more quietly or more coldly. It was all she said. But it was quite enough. Horace Latham took out his engagement-book, an entirely unnecessary bit of social by-play on his part, and he knew it. He knew in his startled bachelor heart that he would not forget that engagement, or arrive late at the tryst. But he was not going to marry any one, much less be laughed into it by Helen Bransby, or witched into it by bewildering personality and composite loveliness. And as for marrying an American wife—he, Horace Latham, M.D., F.R.C.P.—the shades of all his ancestors forbid! But what was the tormenting thing doing now?
Suddenly remembering the object of her visit, she pushed an easy-chair into the center of the room (claiming and taking the stage as it were) and sank into it hysterically.
Mrs. Leavitt looked up uneasily; she hated the furniture moved about.
“Oh! thank Heaven,” cried Angela, “you are all here.”