Miss St. Quentin was quick to resent impertinence, and now momentarily anger struggled with her natural sincerity. But the latter conquered. Again she forgave Mr. Quayle. But a dull flush spread itself over her pale skin, and he perceived that she was distinctly moved. This piqued his curiosity.
"I know I'm awfully foolish about some things," she said. "I can't bear to speak of them. I dread seeing them. The sight of them takes the warmth out of the sunshine."
Again Ludovic fell to nursing his knee.—What an amazing invention is the feminine mind! What endless entertainment is derivable from striving to follow its tergiversations!
"And you saw that which takes the warmth out of the sunshine just now?" he said. "Ah! well—alas, for Dickie Calmady!"
"Still I can't bear any one not to play fair. You should only hit a man your own size. I told Helen de Vallorbes so. I'm very, very fond of her, but she ought to have spared him."—She paused a moment. "All the same if I had not promised Lady Aldham to stay on—as she's so poorly I should have gone out of town when I found the Calmadys had come up."
"Oh! it goes as far as that, does it?" Ludovic murmured.
"I don't like to see them with all these people. The extent to which he is petted and fooled becomes rather horrible."
"Are you not slightly—I ask it with all due deference and humility—just slightly merciless?"
"No, no," the girl answered earnestly. "I don't think I'm that. The women who run after him, and flatter him so outrageously, are really more merciless than I am. I do not pretend to like him—I can't like him, somehow. But I'm growing most tremendously sorry for him. And still more sorry for his mother. She was very grand—a person altogether satisfying to one's imagination and sense of fitness, at home, with that noble house and park and racing stable for setting. But here, she is shorn of her glory somehow."
The girl rose to her feet with lazy grace.