"Hullo!" Reggie said, turning round, and looking a little foolish. He raised a finger to his fair, smooth hair, in mock-respectful salutation.
"Oh, it's you!" Sir Francis said, and paid the young brother no further attention.
The very opposite in manner to the ever-popular Reggie, with his easy manners and his never-failing good temper, Sir Francis, cool, reserved, spare of speech, and in uncongenial society, truth to tell, unconquerably shy, was a difficult person with whom to make talk. He said a few constrained words to Bessie, with whose presence on the scene he had not reckoned any more than with that of his brother; and Bessie, struggling valiantly to appear at ease with him, and failing utterly, answered them according to her kind.
"Very warm, to-day."
Bessie was afraid he felt it so in this stuffy, airless street.
"But you are delightfully in the shade here."
Bessie, straightening her back and pouting her vivid lips, told how the weather made her long for a garden, a river, and waving trees, or the sea-shore.
"Or anything you can't get," Sir Francis commented to himself, looking with distaste at the plump, foolish, pink and white face of the young woman with whom he had been entrapped into intercourse. "You have some roses, I see," he said aloud.
"They are sent to me," smiled a conscious Bessie. She did not consider herself to be lying. What was sent to Deleah she continued to persuade herself was intended for her.
"I know whose money goes for that," Sir Francis inwardly ejaculated. He glanced at his brother, hanging his foolish head from the window again. "I'm glad I came, after all. I'll put a stop to this," he resolved.