“I didn’t believe it—at first. But the proof,”—he went to the desk and laid one hand sorrowfully on the big buff book—“well, it’s too strong to be denied. You shall see it yourself.”
“I will not look. I would not believe it if Hugh told me himself.” She turned quietly and left him, and he dared not stay her.
But he heard her sob as she passed along the hall.
At the sound his white face quivered and he crouched down in a chair and laid his tired face on the table. He sat so for a long time—perfectly still. Presently a wet bead of something salt lay in the heart of the rose lotus flower.
CHAPTER XV
“What a fashion plate!” Angela Hilary exclaimed as she came across her ornate little morning room to greet her guest.
Latham smiled amiably. No one dressed more carefully than he, and he had no mock shyness about having it noted.
“You don’t look especially dowdy yourself,” he returned, as he took in his hand one of her proffered hands and eleven of her rings.
The visit was an unqualified success, and more than once Horace Latham thought ruefully what an ass he had been to fight shy of so delightful a morning.
He was the only guest: it goes without saying, and Latham himself had hoped for nothing else. That he foreknew that it would be a function strictly for two had both assuaged and augmented his maiden nervousness. If this dominant and seductively pretty young widow was determined to press her suit (and quite aside from Helen Bransby’s tormenting prompting he had an odd, fluttering feeling that it was a suit, and not to be side-tracked easily), her opportunities to do so would be tenfolded under her own roof—and they alone. On the other hand, he thought that he could manage himself better, and far more smoothly, safe from the disconcerting flicker of Helen’s mocking eyes, and the not improbable comments, aside and otherwise, of her impish tongue. And, if it came to such stress of issue between them (himself and the widow) that he had no strategical escape left short of brutality, he felt that he would find the exercise of such brutal harshness somewhat less abominable and repugnant when no third one was present to witness Angela’s discomfiture.