She laughed again, and then in response to a cynical and incredulously interrogative ejaculation from Loring, she clasped her hands lightly on her knee and went on with the animation of a woman who has a good story to tell and enjoys telling it.
“She contracted the complaint, they say, in a poky little church in Kensington into which Gladys Ashton strolled one morning and got herself married. Oh, dear no! Her mother wasn’t there! That’s one of the points of the affair. And Lord Rochdale wasn’t there either.”
“Gladys Ashton jilted Rochdale after all!”
“After all!” assented Mrs. Romayne gaily. “After all that poor woman’s trouble, after the quite pathetic way in which she has slaved to catch him, she gets a letter from the ungrateful girl—at an afternoon tea, too, heaps of people there—to say that she is Mrs. Bob Stewart. Baccarat Bob you wretched men at the clubs call him, don’t you?”
“That was enough to induce convulsions, let alone neuralgia,” commented Loring.
They both laughed, and the laugh was succeeded by a moment’s silence. Then Loring said casually:
“What has become of your cousin, Falconer, among other people, by-the-bye? I don’t hear anything of him, and his grim presence was hardly to be overlooked. Have you any little escapade of his to reveal, now?”
Mrs. Romayne laughed a little harshly.
“Unfortunately not,” she said. “His absence is due to the most characteristically orthodox causes. He was ill about three months ago. He went into a hospital sort of place—one of those new things—and he was rather bad. Now he’s somewhere or other recovering. I fancy he won’t be in London again yet.”
Loring received the news with a comment as indifferent as his question had been, and then there fell a second silence. Loring’s eyes, very keen and calculating, were fixed upon the carpet; on Mrs. Romayne’s face was an accentuation of the intent, preoccupied look which had lain behind all her previous gaiety. The two faces suggested curiously that the man and woman alike felt individually and each irrespective of the other that something in the shape of a prologue was over, and that the real interest of the interview might begin.