“You have had my note, I hope?” he said. “You are settled in London now, Thomson tells me.”
Thomson was the family lawyer, and he and Dennis Falconer himself were Mrs. Romayne’s trustees under old Mr. Falconer’s will.
“Oh, yes!” she answered suavely. “I had it to-day, just before lunch. So nice of you to write to me. Yes, we are settled——”
She had been fanning herself carelessly throughout the short colloquy, glancing at Falconer or about the room with every appearance of perfect ease; but now, as her eyes wandered to the other end of the room something seemed to catch her attention. She hesitated, appeared to forget what she had intended to say, tried to recover herself, and failed.
Julian had come into the room, and was just parting gaily from some one in the doorway. Dennis Falconer did not take up her unfinished sentence; he followed the direction of her eyes across the room until his own rested upon Julian, and then he started slightly and glanced down at the woman by his side.
Mrs. Romayne laughed a rather high, unnatural laugh. She faced him with her eyes very hard and bright, and her lips smiling; and through all the artificiality of her face and manner there was something lurking in those hard, bright eyes as she did it, something not to be caught or defined, which made the movement almost heroic.
“You recognise him?” she said lightly. “Ridiculously like me, isn’t he?”
At that moment Julian started across the room, evidently to come to his mother. He came on, stopping incessantly to exchange good-nights, laughing, bowing, and smiling; and, as though there were a fascination for them about his gay young figure, the man and woman standing together at the other end of the room watched him draw nearer and nearer. Words continued to come from Mrs. Romayne, a pretty, inconsequent flow of society chatter, but it no more tempered the strange gaze with which her eyes followed her son than did the unheeding silence with which Falconer received them as his grave eyes rested also on the young man. The whole thing was so incongruous; the expression of those two pair of eyes was so utterly out of harmony with their surroundings, and with the laughing, unconscious boy on whom they were fixed; that they seemed to draw him out from the brightly dressed, smiling groups through which he passed, and isolate him strangely in a weird atmosphere of his own.
“Here you are, sir!” cried his mother gaily, looking no longer at Julian as he stood close to her at last, but beyond him.
“Lord Garstin told me you were ready to go, dear,” said Julian pleasantly. “I hope I haven’t kept you?”