The champagne corks began to fly and the knives to clatter amidst a crescendo movement of talk and laughter, while Lavendale sat back in his chair and conversed in half-whispers with Judith, who also leant back in her chair, so that they two were, in a manner, apart from the gormandisers and merrymakers at the table. He was looking better than he had looked in the morning; but the glow on his cheek and the brightness of his eye were but the transient effect of the Burgundy he had drunk at dinner and the excitement of an evening at bassett.
He held his glass for a footman to fill with champagne, and drained it at a gulp.
"Aren't you going to eat something?" asked Judith.
"Eat! no; in your society I am too ethereal to eat. Mind has the upper hand of matter."
He drank his second glass of wine next moment.
"Champagne does not count, I suppose?" said Judith; "and yet I never heard of sylphs that were wine-bibbers."
"A bottle of champagne is no more to me than a drop of dew to a sylph: there is nothing earthy about it. Look at Lady Polwhele devouring turkey and ham with the appetite of a chairman, and yet after supper she will be as évaporée as you please—a bundle of nerves and emotions. Hark!"
It was the eight-day clock in the hall striking the hour. Lavendale had made no comment upon the passage of time hitherto, and all his friends were inwardly chuckling over the trick that had been played him, which had been explained to them as a wager of Bolingbroke's. Could his lordship cheat his host out of an hour before the end of the year, he was to win a hundred guineas.
This time Lavendale stopped talking, listened intently, and counted every stroke.
"Eleven!" he exclaimed; "how late we are supping!"