“Thanks, so much!” she said quickly. “I really could not think of troubling you. I’ve no doubt I shall be able to hold on until Mr. Thomson is well again. Thanks immensely! You will not be within reach for very long, I suppose?”
“I shall be in London for a year, certainly,” answered Falconer, acknowledging her tacit refusal to recognise any claim on him in the formal directness of his reply. Then, as she uttered a sharp little exclamation of surprise, he added briefly; “I am in the doctors’ hands, unfortunately. There is something wrong with me, they say.”
“I am very sorry——” she began prettily, though her eyes were rather hard and preoccupied. But at that moment the door opened to admit an influx of visitors, and Falconer rose to go.
“So glad to have seen you!” she said as she turned to him after welcoming the new-comers. “You won’t have a cup of tea? It is always rather crushing when a man refuses one’s tea, isn’t it, Mrs. Anson?” turning as she spoke to a lady sitting close by. Then as she gave him her hand, speaking in a tone which still included the other lady in the conversation, she alluded for the first time to Julian. The whole call had gone by without one of those references to “my boy” with which all Mrs. Romayne’s acquaintances were so familiar, that such an omission under the circumstances would have been hardly credible to any one of them.
“I’m so sorry you have missed my boy!” she said now with her apologetic laugh. “I’m afraid I am absurdly proud of him—isn’t that so, dear Mrs. Anson?—but he really is a dear fellow.”
“He is going to the bar, I believe?” said Falconer; his face and voice alike were uncompromisingly stern and unbending.
“Yes!” answered Julian’s mother. “He is not clever, dear boy, but I hope he may do fairly well. Good-bye! Shall you be at the Gordons’ to-night? We are going first to see the American actor they rave about so. A funny little domestic party—I and my son and my son’s new and particular ‘chum.’ Good-bye!”
Mrs. Romayne’s face did not regain its normal colour as she turned her attention to her other callers, nor did those faint lines about her mouth and eyes disappear. She was particularly charming that afternoon, but always, as she welcomed one set of visitors or parted from another, laughing, talking or listening so gaily, there was a faint, hardly definable air of preoccupation about her. She had a great many visitors, and the afternoon grew hotter as it wore on. When she dressed for dinner that night, finding herself strangely nervous, irritable with her maid, and “on edge altogether,” as she expressed it, she was very definite and distinct in her self-assurances that such an unusual state of things was owing solely to the heat and “those tiresome people”; rather unnecessarily distinct and explicit it would have seemed, since there was apparently no chance of contradiction.
The acquaintanceship between Julian and Marston Loring had developed during the past fortnight with surprising rapidity. They had dined together at the club, they had smoked together in Loring’s chambers, and they had met incessantly at dances, “at homes,” or dinners, on all of which occasions Mrs. Romayne had been uniformly gracious to her son’s friend.
At a garden-party a few miles out of London, admittedly the greatest failure of the season, when Loring and the Romaynes had walked about together all the afternoon with that carelessness of social obligations which a dull party is apt to engender, the scheme for the present evening had been arranged; Loring adding a preliminary dinner at a restaurant, with himself in the capacity of host to Mrs. Romayne and her son, to the original suggestion that they should go together to the theatre.