But he put her right immediately.
"I don't think she in the least is. And why," he went on, "since happiness is so greatly the question of other people's state of mind, might we not let it go at the fact that she is herself very much loved?"
The Duchess looked at her guest rather absently. She was thinking of the happy beauty, the woman of a different type from her own, whose presence at Westboro' had been sought by her husband for the second time.
"Oh," she answered rather absently, giving Jimmy her hand, "she wouldn't, you know, be happy if the feeling were all on the other side."
When the Duke had casually asked his guest's plans for Christmas week, Bulstrode had come near to offending his host by declaring that he could not possibly be one of a second house party.
"Do you, then," Westboro' had asked, "hate the holidays?"
The genial Bulstrode had assured him to the contrary.
"Nor do I," continued the Duke, "even though I'm a miserable man on the verge of a divorce. I expect there's too long a line of jolly Christmases back of the Westboro's for me to mope through the season. But I don't want to have Christmas coming to an empty house, my dear fellow"—He put it pathetically, "there's no one in this gloomy place but yourself and myself. We must have a Christmas party. The tenants will, of course, be noisy and cheerful, but I'm going to ask a lot of people down and make the list out now."
And Bulstrode had, however, firmly insisted that he could not really stop on—that he must go away. "There are," he wound up his arguments, "a thousand reasons why I should go."
But Westboro' had comprehendingly suggested that they might together bring "every reason" down to the country. "And," continued his Grace, "we'll narrow things into the most intimate circle possible. For I shall ask the Ravensworths of Surrey and their children, there are eight of them, ripping little things; they used to play with my boys. We'll turn them loose and have a tree, old man."