Rose regarded him thoughtfully, her composure fully restored. “He has a very remarkable face,” she observed, “and it is fine and pale like a bit of old ivory.”
“Oh, yes, all the women fall in love with him,” Allestree assented with impatient irony.
“Do they? That doesn’t sound interesting, but I should not believe it of his face, he doesn’t look like a lady’s man! Is it true—” she added with a moment’s hesitation—“that he has never loved any one but Margaret White?”
“It’s true that Margaret treated him abominably,” said Allestree bluntly; “she was engaged to him when they were both very young and threw him over to marry White.”
“What a singular choice,” Rose observed, “White has nothing attractive about him, and he is so selfish, so hard; they say he treats her badly.”
“He should—in poetic justice,” replied Allestree laughing, “for she married him for his money and his position. Fox was a poor man then with no prospects but his brains and, strange to say, Margaret underestimated their possibilities.”
“And yet she is very clever. Did he really feel it so much?” she added, her natural sympathy for a sentimental situation touched and strengthened by the remembrance of Fox’s clear-cut face, which had appeared to her vision cameo-like against the night.
“Now you are beginning to ask me your unanswerable questions,” he retorted smiling grimly, with a keen sense of annoyance that Fox could intrude so sharply into their talk. “I know he was very much in love with her then, but he is on good terms with them both now and—” he stopped abruptly; his quick ear had caught a step on the stairs accompanied by another sound which startled him with an impatient certainty of a surprise.
It was the tread of a large Scotch collie who lifted the portière on his nose and walked deliberately into the room. Allestree laid down his brush with a peculiarly exasperated expression.
“Well, Sandy,” he said, not unkindly, addressing the dog.