Mr. Haldane bade them good night at the bottom of the garden steps, where his outrigger was waiting for him. It would have been so easy to ask him to dinner, so easy to keep him till midnight, so easy to prolong the sweetness of golden hours. But Grace was discreet. They were not lovers, only friends. She wanted to spin to its finest thread this season of sweet uncertainty, these exquisite hours on the threshold of Paradise. And then Sue might think him a bore. Sue was not overfond of masculine society. She liked to put her feet on a chair after dinner, and she sometimes liked a cigarette.
"I never smoke before men," she told Grace. "They think we do it to please, or to shock them."
CHAPTER X.
"True as steel, boys!
That knows all chases, and can watch all hours."
In the course of that summer afternoon's talk with Grace Perivale, Arthur Haldane had explained the change in his plans since their meeting in Regent's Park.
The business which would have taken him away from England for some time had hung fire, and his journey was postponed indefinitely. He did not tell her that his contemplated journey was solely in her interests, that he had thought of going to America in quest of Colonel Rannock, with the idea that he, the man with whose name Lady Perivale's had been associated, should himself set her right before that little world which had condemned her. He knew not by what machinery that rehabilitation could be accomplished; but his first impulse was to find the man whose acquaintance had brought this trouble upon her.
Two days after that golden sunset in which he and Lady Perivale had parted, with clasped hands that vowed life-long fidelity, while yet no word had been spoken, Mr. Haldane called upon John Faunce at his pied à terre in Essex Street.
He had written for an appointment on business connected with Lady Perivale's case, and Faunce had replied asking him to call at his rooms in Essex Street at ten o'clock next morning. An early hour, which denoted the man whose every hour was valuable.
He found the house one of the oldest in the old-world street, next door to a nest of prosperous solicitors, but itself of a somewhat shabby and retiring aspect. The bell was answered by a bright-eyed servant girl, clean and fresh looking, but with an accent that suggested the Irish Town Limerick, rather than a London slum—a much pleasanter accent to Haldane's ear.