Captain Marduke, of the Blues, outstayed the others, and put on a certain familiarity of tone. It was the faintest shade of difference, but Lady Perivale was aware of it, and froze him out in five minutes by her distant manner.
He met Mordaunt at his club before dinner.
"Wasn't it awful in Grosvenor Square, Tommy?" said his friend.
"Ghastly. Don't you think she was a fool to show herself in London after her escapade?" returned Marduke, who had been christened Reginald Stuart Ponsonby, and was Tommy to his friends and the Society papers.
"I can't understand it," said Mordaunt, chalking his cue slowly, and looking at the tip with a puzzled expression, as if the mystery were there. "Such a good woman I always thought her. The very last, don't you know, to pitch her cap over the mill. And the way she looked at us this afternoon, through and through, with such proud, steady eyes! It's damn perplexing."
"So it is, Bill. Your shot."
"But are people sure of the story? Is there no mistake, do you think?" asked Mordaunt, missing an easy cannon.
"Oh! people are sure enough. It isn't one man's word, you see. Brander met them at Ajaccio, saw her stepping into a carriage in front of the hotel, met him face to face in the coffee-room, knew by his confused manner that there was something up, questioned the manager, and found they had been living there a fortnight as Mr. and Mrs. Randall. Jack Dane saw them in Sardinia. The Willoughby Parkers came upon them in Algiers, staying at a second-rate hotel in the town, saw them sitting under a palm-tree, taking their coffee, as they drove by, and met them driving in the environs. No mistaking her—as handsome a woman as you'd see in a day's journey; no mistaking him—a wrong 'un, but a damn good-looking demon, with the manners of Chesterfield and the morals of Robert Macaire, the sort of man most women admire."
"Only the wrong sort of women, I think," said Mordaunt, resuming his cue, the soldier having spaced his sentences with cannons and losers, and made a break of twenty while he talked. "I can't understand such a woman as Lady Perivale disgracing herself by an intrigue of that kind—least of all for such a man as Rannock. Thoroughly bad style!"
"Women don't know bad style from good in our sex; they only know their own by the clothes."