"I am to take you in to dinner," he said. "It is your misfortune, but not my fault."
"I am glad," she said. "I came to you last night because I had something urgent to say to you. I shall have an opportunity of saying it now."
The constraint and awkwardness he had of late felt in her presence fell from him. It seemed as if they had gone back by some welcome short cut to the simple intercourse of the halcyon days when they had first met.
He cursed himself for his mole-like obtuseness in having thought last night that she was playing into her mother's hands. When had she ever done so? Why had he suspected her?
In the meanwhile the world was
"At rest with will
And leisure to be fair."
The Duchess was not there, suddenly and mercifully laid low by that occasional friend of society—influenza. The Duke, gay and débonnaire in her absence, was beaming on his hostess whom he was to take into dinner, and to whom he was sentimentally linked by a mild flirtation in a past decade, a flirtation so mild that it had no real existence, except in the imaginative remembrance of both.
Presently Anne and Stephen were walking in to dinner together. It was a large party, and they sat together at the end of the table.
Anne did not wait this time. She began to talk at once.