There was a moment’s curiously dead silence, and then it was broken by a strange half-laugh.
“No doubt!” said Mrs. Romayne. “No doubt!”
Another pause, and then she turned and glanced at the clock.
“I must go,” she said. “Thank you.”
She held out her hand, and he just touched it as though conventionality alone compelled him.
“I have considered myself bound in duty in the matter,” he said stiffly. “Good night!”
No touch of artificiality returned to her manner even in dismissing him. It remained hard and practical. Her intense absorption in the subject of their interview did not yield by so much as a hair’s breadth, and she remained absolutely impervious to any thought of the man before her. His slight, cold touch of her hand, the sternness of his obvious condemnation of her, were evidently absolutely unobserved by her.
“Good night!” she returned; and as he left her without another word, she crossed the room rapidly and went upstairs to dress for dinner.
The dinner-party of that evening was unanimously declared by the guests to be quite the most delightful Mrs. Romayne had ever given. The dinner, the flowers, all the arrangements, were perfection, of course; but even when this is the case the “go” of a dinner-party may be a variable or even a non-existent quality; and it was the “go” of this particular occasion that was so remarkable. All the component parts of the party seemed to be animated and fused into one harmonious whole by the spirits of the hostess and host. Mrs. Romayne was so charming, so bright, so full of vivacity; Julian, who put in his appearance only just before the announcement of dinner, was so boyish, so lively, so ingenuous. He was a little pale when he first appeared, and the lady he took down to dinner reproached him with working too hard; but as the evening wore on he gained colour. The relations between himself and his mother had always been quite one of the features of Mrs. Romayne’s entertainments, but those relations had never been more charmingly accentuated than they were to-night.
Until he came gaily in among her guests that evening, Julian and his mother had not met since that second interview which had prompted her summons to Falconer. Julian had dined out on both the intervening evenings, and it was easily to be arranged under these circumstances, if either of the pair so willed it, that forty-eight hours should go by without their coming in contact with one another. And an onlooker aware of the circumstances of their last meeting, and watching the mother and son through the evening now, might have reflected that the laws of heredity seldom operate exclusively through one parent.